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WORKS  BY 

SIR  RABINDRANATH  TAGORE 

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LONDON:  MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,  Ltd. 


NATIONALISM 


MACMILLAN  AND    CO.,  Limited 

LONDON    •    BOMBAY    •    CALCUTTA    •    MADRAS 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW    YORK    •    BOSTON    •    CHICAGO 
DALLAS    •   SAN   FRANCISCO 

THE.  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


NATIONALISM 


BY 

Sir   RABINDRANATH   TAGORE 


MACMILLAN    AND    CO.,    LIMITED 
ST.   MARTIN'S   STREET,  LONDON 

1918 


COPYRIGHT 

First  Edition  191 7 
Reprinted  19 18  {twice) 


I    0  Ais>i^ 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
I 


Nationalism  in  the  West  ...... 

Nationalism  in  Japan 47 

Nationalism  in  India  .         ,     '    .         .         .         .         95 

The  Sunset  of  the  Century     ,         .         .         .         .131 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST 


B 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST 

Man's  history  is  being  shaped  according  to  the 
difficulties  it  encounters.  These  have  offered  us 
problems  and  claimed  their  solutions  from  us, 
the  penalty  of  non-fulfilment  being  death  or 
degradation. 

These  difficulties  have  been  different  in 
different  peoples  of  the  earth,  and  in  the  manner 
of  our  overcoming  them  lies  our  distinction. 

The  Scythians  of  the  earlier  period  of  Asiatic 
history  had  to  struggle  with  the  scarcity  of  their 
natural  resources.  The  easiest  solution  that  they 
could  think  of  was  to  organize  their  whole  popula- 
tion, men,  women,  and  children,  into  bands  of 
robbers.  And  they  were  irresistible  to  those 
who  were  chiefly  engaged  in  the  constructive 
work  of  social  co-operation. 

But  fortunately  for  man  the  easiest  path  is 
not  his  truest  path.  If  his  nature  were  not  as 
complex  as  it  is,  if  it  were  as  simple  as  that  of  a 


4  NATIONALISM 

pack  of  hungry  wolves,  then,  by  this  time,  those 
hordes  of  marauders  would  have  overrun  the 
whole  earth.  But  man,  when  confronted  with 
difficulties,  has  to  acknowledge  that  he  is  man, 
that  he  has  his  responsibilities  to  the  higher 
faculties  of  his  nature,  by  ignoring  which  he 
may  achieve  success  that  is  immediate,  perhaps, 
but  that  will  become  a  death-trap  to  him.  For 
what  are  obstacles  to  the  lower  creatures  are' 
opportunities  to  the  higher  life  of  man. 

To  India  has  been  given  her  problem  from 
the  beginning  of  history — it  is  the  race  problem. 
Races  ethnologically  different  have  in  this  country 
come  into  close  contact.  This  fact  has  been  and 
still  continues  to  be  the  most  important  one  in 
our  history.  It  is  our  mission  to  face  it  and 
prove  our  humanity  by  dealing  with  it  in  the 
fullest  truth.  Until  we  fulfil  our  mission  all 
other  benefits  will  be  denied  us. 

There  are  other  peoples  in  the  world  who 
have  to  overcome  obstacles  in  their  physical 
surroundings,  or  the  menace  of  their  powerful 
neighbours.  They  have  organized  their  power 
till  they  are  not  only  reasonably  free  from  the 
tyranny  of  Nature  and  human  neighbours,  but 
have  a  surplus  of  it  left  in  their  hands  to  employ 
atrainst   others.     But   in    India,  our   difficulties 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST       5 

being  internal,  our  history  has  been  the  history 
of  continual  social  adjustment  and  not  that  of 
organized  power  for  defence  and  aggression. 

Neither  the  colourless  vagueness  of  cosmo- 
politanism, nor  the  fierce  self-idolatry  of  nation- 
worship,  is  the  goal  of  human  history.  And 
India  has  been  trying  to  accomplish  her  task 
through  social  regulation  of  differences,  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  spiritual  recognition  of  unity 
on  the  other.  She  has  made  grave  errors  in 
setting  up  the  boundary  walls  too  rigidly  between 
races,  in  perpetuating  in  her  classifications  the 
results  of  inferiority ;  often  she  has  crippled  her 
children's  minds  and  narrowed  their  lives  in 
order  to  fit  them  into  her  social  forms ;  but  for 
centuries  new  experiments  have  been  made  and 
adjustments  carried  out. 

Her  mission  has  been  like  that  of  a  hostess 
who  has  to  provide  proper  accommodation  for 
numerous  guests,  whose  habits  and  requirements 
are  different  from  one  another.  This  gives  rise 
to  infinite  complexities  whose  solution  depends 
not  merely  upon  tactfulness  but  upon  sympathy 
and  true  realization  of  the  unity  of  man.  Towards 
this  realization  have  worked,  from  the  early  time 
of  the  Upanishads  up  to  the  present  moment, 
a  series  of  great  spiritual   teachers,  v/hose   one 


6  NATIONALISM 

object  has  been  to  set  at  naught  all  differences 
of  man  by  the  overflow  of  our  consciousness  of 
God.  In  fact,  our  history  has  not  been  of  the 
rise  and  fall  of  kingdoms,  of  fights  for  political 
supremacy.  In  our  country  records  of  these 
days  have  been  despised  and  forgotten,  for 
they  in  no  way  represent  the  true  history  of 
our  people.  Our  history  is  that  of  our  social 
life  and  attainment  of  spiritual  ideals. 

But  we  feel  that  our  task  is  not  yet  done. 
The  world-flood  has  swept  over  our  country, 
new  elements  have  been  introduced,  and  wider 
adjustments  are  waiting  to  be  made. 

We  feel  this  all  the  more,  because  the  teach- 
ing and  example  of  the  West  have  entirely  run 
counter  to  what  we  think  was  given  to  India  to 
accomplish.  In  the  West  the  national  machinery 
of  commerce  and  politics  turns  out  neatly  com- 
pressed bales  of  humanity  which  have  their  use 
and  high  market  value ;  but  they  are  bound 
in  iron  hoops,  labelled  and  separated  off  with 
scientific  care  and  precision.  Obviously  God  made 
man  to  be  human  ;  but  this  modern  product  has 
such  marvellous  square-cut  finish,  savouring  of 
gigantic  manufacture,  that  the  Creator  will  find 
it  difficult  to  recognize  it  as  a  thing  of  spirit 
and  a  creature  made  in  His  own  divine  image. 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST       7 

But  I  am  anticipating.  What  I  was  about  to 
say  is  this.  Take  it  in  whatever  spirit  you  like, 
here  is  India,  of  about  fifty  centuries  at  least, 
who  tried  to  hve  peacefully  and  think  deeply,  the 
India  devoid  of  all  politics,  the  India  of  no  nations, 
whose  one  ambition  has  been  to  know  this  world 
as  of  soul,  to  live  here  every  moment  of  her  life  in/ 
the  meek  spirit  of  adoration,  in  the  glad  conscious- 
ness of  an  eternal  and  personal  relationship  with 
it.  It  was  upon  this  remote  portion  of  humanity, 
childlike  in  its  manner,  with  the  wisdom  of  the 
old,  that  the  Nation  of  the  West  burst  in. 

Through  all  the  fights  and  intrigues  and 
deceptions  of  her  earlier  history  India  had 
remained  aloof.  Because  her  homes,  her  fields, 
her  temples  of  worship,  her  schools,  where  her 
teachers  and  students  lived  together  in  the 
atmosphere  of  simplicity  and  devotion  and 
learning,  her  village  self-government  with  its 
simple  laws  and  peaceful  administration — all 
these  truly  belonged  to  her.  But  her  thrones  were 
not  her  concern.  They  passed  over  her  head  like 
clouds,  now  tinged  with  purple  gorgeousness, 
now  black  with  the  threat  of  thunder.  Often 
they  brought  devastations  in  their  wake,  but 
they  were  like  catastrophes  of  nature  whose 
traces  are  soon  forgotten. 


/ 


8  NATIONALISM 

But  this  time  it  was  different.  It  was  not 
a  mere  drift  over  her  surface  of  life, — drift  of 
cavalry  and  foot  soldiers,  richly  caparisoned 
elephants,  white  tents  and  canopies,  strings  of 
patient  camels  bearing  the  loads  of  royalty, 
bands  of  kettle-drums  and  flutes,  marble  domes 
of  mosques,  palaces  and  tombs,  like  tlie  bubbles 
of  the  foaming  wine  of  extravagance ;  stories 
of  treachery  and  loyal  devotion,  of  changes  of 
fortune,  of  dramatic  surprises  of  fate.  This 
time  it  was  the  Nation  of  the  West  driving  its 
tentacles  of  machinery  deep  down  into  the  soil. 

Therefore  I  say  to  you,  it  is  we  who  are  called 
as  witnesses  to  give  evidence  as  to  what  our 
Nation  has  been  to  humanity.  We  had  known 
the  hordes  of  Moojhals  and  Pathans  who  invaded 

CD  * 

India,  but  we  had  known  them  as  human  races, 
with  their  own  religions  and  customs,  likes  and 
dislikes, — we  had  never  known  them  as  a  nation. 
We  loved  and  hated  them  as  occasions  arose  ;  we 
fought  for  them  and  against  them,  talked  with 
them  in  a  language  which  was  theirs  as  well  as 
our  own,  and  guided  the  destiny  of  the  Empire 
in  which  we  had  our  active  share.  But  this  time 
we  had  to  deal,  not  with  kings,  not  with  human 
races,  but  with  a  nation — we,  who  are  no  nation 
ourselves. 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST       9 

Now  let  us  from  our  own  experience  answer 
the  question,  What  is  this  Nation  ? 

A  nation,  in  the  sense  of  the  political  and 
economic  union  of  a  people,  is  that  aspect  which 
a  whole  population  assumes  when  organized  for 
a  mechanical  purpose.  Society  as  such  has  no 
ulterior  purpose.  It  is  an  end  in  itself.  It  is 
a  spontaneous  self-expression  of  man  as  a  social 
being.  It  is  a  natural  regulation  of  human 
relationships,  so  that  men  can  develop  ideals 
of  life  in  co-operation  with  one  another.  It 
has  also  a  political  side,  but  this  is  only  for  a 
special  purpose.  It , is  for  self-preservation.  It 
is  merely  the  side  of  power,  not  of  human  ideals. 
And  in  the  early  days  it  had  its  separate  place 
in  society,  restricted  to  the  professionals.  But 
when  with  the  help  of  science  and  the  perfecting 
of  organization  this  power  begins  to  grow  and 
brings  in  harvests  of  wealth,  then  it  crosses 
its  boundaries  with  amazing  rapidity.  For 
then  it  goads  all  its  neighbouring  societies  with 
greed  of  material  prosperity,  and  consequent 
mutual  jealousy,  and  by  the  fear  of  each  other's 
growth  into  powerfulness.  The  time  comes 
when  it  can  stop  no  longer,  for  the  competition 
grows  keener,  organization  grows  vaster,  and 
selfishness    attains    supremacy.      Trading    upon 


10  NATIONALISM 

the  greed  and  fear  of  man,  it  occupies  more  and 
more  space  in  society,  and  at  last  becomes  its 
ruling  force. 

It  is  just  possible  that  you  have  lost  through 
habit  consciousness  that  the  living  bonds  of 
society  are  breaking  up,  and  giving  place  to 
merely  mechanical  organization.  But  you  see 
signs  of  it  everywhere.  It  is  owing  to  this  that 
war  has  been  declared  between  man  and  woman, 
because  the  natural  thread  is  snapping  which 
holds  them  together  in  harmony  ;  because  man 
is  driven  to  professionalism,  producing  wealth 
for  himself  and  others,  continually  turning  the 
wheel  of  power  for  his  own  sake  or  for  the  sake 
of  the  universal  officialdom,  leaving  woman 
alone  to  wither  and  to  die  or  to  fight  her  own 
battle  unaided.  And  thus  there  where  co- 
operation is  natural  has  intruded  competition. 
The  very  psychology  of  men  and  women  about 
their  mutual  relation  is  changing  and  becoming 
the  psychology  of  the  primitive  fighting  elements, 
rather  than  of  humanity  seeking  its  completeness 
through  the  union  based  upon  mutual  self- 
surrender.  For  the  elements  which  have  lost 
their  living  bond  of  reality  have  lost  the  mean- 
ing of  their  existence.  Like  gaseous  particles 
forced    into    a    too    narrow   space,    they    come 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     11 

in  continual  conflict  with  each  other  till  they 
burst  the  very  arrangement  which  holds  them 
in  bondage. 

Then  look  at  those  who  call  themselves 
anarchists,  who  resent  the  imposition  of  power, 
in  any  form  whatever,  upon  the  individual. 
The  only  reason  for  this  is  that  power  has 
become  too  abstract — it  is  a  scientific  product 
made  in  the  political  laboratory  of  the  Nation, 
through  the  dissolution  of  personal  humanity. 

And  what  is  the  meaning  of  these  strikes 
in  the  economic  world,  which  like  the  prickly 
shrubs  in  a  barren  soil  shoot  up  with  renewed 
vigour  each  time  they  are  cut  down  ?  What, 
but  that  the  wealth  -  producing  mechanism  is 
incessantly  growing  into  vast  stature,  out  of 
proportion  to  all  other  needs  of  society, — and 
the  full  reality  of  man  is  more  and  more  crushed 
under  its  weight  ?  This  state  of  things  inevit- 
ably gives  rise  to  eternal  feuds  among  the 
elements  freed  from  the  wholeness  and  whole- 
someness  of  human  ideals,  and  interminable 
economic  war  is  waged  between  capital  and 
labour.  For  greed  of  wealth  and  power  can 
never  have  a  limit,  and  compromise  of  self- 
interest  can  never  attain  the  final  spirit  of 
reconciliation.      They    must    go    on    breeding 


NATIONALISM 

jealousy  and  suspicion  to  the  end  —  the  end 
which  only  comes  through  some  sudden 
catastrophe  or  a  spiritual  re-birth. 

When  this  organization  of  politics  and  com- 
merce, whose  other  name  is  the  Nation,  becomes 
all-powerful  at  the  cost  of  the  harmony  of  the 
higher  social  life,  then  it  is  an  evil  day  for 
humanity.  When  a  father  becomes  a  gambler 
and  his  obligations  to  his  family  take  the 
secondary  place  in  his  mind,  then  he  is  no 
longer  a  man,  but  an  automaton  led  by  the 
power  of  greed.  Then  he  can  do  things  which, 
in  his  normal  state  of  mind,  he  would  be  ashamed 
to  do.  It  is  the  same  thing  with  society.  When 
it  allows  itself  to  be  turned  into  a  perfect 
organization  of  power,  then  there  are  few  crimes 
which  it  is  unable  to  perpetrate.  Because 
success  is  the  object  and  justification  of  a 
machine,  while  goodness  only  is  the  end  and 
purpose  of  man.  When  this  engine  of  organiza- 
tion begins  to  attain  a  vast  size,  and  those  who 
are  mechanics  are  made  into  parts  of  the 
machine,  then  the  personal  man  is  eliminated 
to  a  phantom,  everything  becomes  a  revolution 
of  policy  carried  out  by  the  human  parts  of 
the  machine,  with  no  twinge  of  pity  or  moral 
responsibility.    It  may  happen  that  even  through 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     13 

this  apparatus  the  moral  nature  of  man  tries 
to  assert  itself,  but  the  whole  series  of  ropes 
and  pullies  creak  and  cry,  the  forces  of  the 
human  heart  become  entangled  among  the 
forces  of  the  human  automaton,  and  only  with 
difficulty  can  the  moral  purpose  transmit  itself 
into  some  tortured  shape  of  result. 

This    abstract    being,    the   Nation,    is   ruling 
India.     We   have   seen    in    our    country   some 
brand  of  tinned  food  advertised  as  entirely  made 
and   packed    without   being   touched   by    hand. 
This   description   applies   to    the   governing   of 
India,  which  is  as  little  touched  by  the  human 
hand    as    possible.      The   governors    need    not 
know  our  language,  need  not  come  into  personal 
touch    with    us    except    as   officials ;    they    can 
aid  or  hinder  our  aspirations  from  a  disdainful 
distance,  they  can  lead  us  on  a  certain  path  of 
policy  and  then  pull  us   back  again   with   the 
manipulation  of  office  red  tape  ;  the  newspapers 
of  England,   in  whose   columns  London  street 
accidents   are   recorded   with   some   decency  of 
pathos,  need  but  take   the   scantiest   notice  of 
calamities  which  happen  in  India  over  areas  of 
land  sometimes  larger  than  the  British  Isles. 

But  we,  who  are  governed,  are  not   a  mere 
abstraction.     We,  on  our   side,  are   individuals 


^^ 


14  NATIONALISM 

with  living  sensibilities.  What  comes  to  us  in 
the  shape  of  a  mere  bloodless  policy  may  pierce 
into  the  very  core  of  our  life,  may  threaten  the 
whole  future  of  our  people  with  a  perpetual 
helplessness  of  emasculation,  and  yet  may  never 
touch  the  chord  of  humanity  on  the  other  side, 
or  touch  it  in  the  most  inadequately  feeble 
manner.  Such  wholesale  and  universal  acts  of 
fearful  responsibility  man  can  never  perform, 
with  such  a  degree  of  systematic  unawareness, 
where  he  is  an  individual  human  being.  These 
only  become  possible,  where  the  man  is  repre- 
sented by  an  octopus  of  abstractions,  sending 
out  its  wriggling  arms  in  all  directions  of  space, 
and  fixing  its  innumerable  suckers  even  into  the 
far  -  away  future.  In  this  reign  of  the  nation, 
the  governed  are  pursued  by  suspicions  ;  and 
these  are  the  suspicions  of  a  tremendous  mass  of 
organized  brain  and  muscle.  Punishments  are 
meted  out,  which  leave  a  trail  of  miseries  across 
a  large  bleeding  tract  of  the  human  heart ;  but 
these  punishments  are  dealt  by  a  mere  abstract 
force,  in  which  a  whole  population  of  a  distant 
country  has  lost  its  human  personality. 

I  have  not  come  here,  however,  to  discuss 
the  question  as  it  affects  my  own  country,  but 
as  it  affects  the  future  of  all  humanity.     It  is 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     15 

not  a  question  of  the  British  Government,  but  of 
government  by  the  Nation — the  Nation  which 
is  the  organized  self-interest  of  a  whole  people, 
where  it  is  least  human  and  least  spiritual.  Our 
only  intimate  experience  of  the  Nation  is  with 
the  British  Nation,  and  as  far  as  the  govern- 
ment by  the  Nation  goes  there  are  reasons  to 
believe  that  it  is  one  of  the  best.  Then,  again, 
we  have  to  consider  that  the  West  is  necessary 
to  the  East.  We  are  complementary  to  each 
other  because  of  our  different  outlooks  upon  life 
which  have  given  us  different  aspects  of  truth. 
Therefore  if  it  be  true  that  the  spirit  of  the 
West  has  come  upon  our  fields  in  the  guise  of 
a  storm  it  is  nevertheless  scattering  living  seeds 
that  are  immortal.  And  when  in  India  we  become 
able  to  assimilate  in  our  life  what  is  permanent 
in  Western  civilization  we  shall  be  in  the  position 
to  bring  about  a  reconciliation  of  these  two 
great  worlds.  Then  will  come  to  an  end  the 
one-sided  dominance  which  is  galling.  What  isl^ 
more,  we  have  to  recognize  that  the  history  of 
India  does  not  belong  to  one  particular  race  but 
to  a  process  of  creation  to  which  various  races 
of  the  world  contributed  —  the  Dra vidians  and 
the  Aryans,  the  ancient  Greeks  and  the  Persians, 
the  Mohammedans   of  the  West  and  those  of 


16  NATIONALISM 

central  Asia.  Now  at  last  has  come  the  turn  of 
the  English  to  become  true  to  this  history  and 
bring  to  it  the  tribute  of  their  life,  and  we 
neither  have  the  right  nor  the  power  to  exclude 
this  people  from  the  building  of  the  destiny  of 
India.  Therefore  what  I  say  about  the  Nation 
has  more  to  do  with  the  history  of  Man  than 
specially  with  that  of  India. 

This  history  has  come  to  a  stage  when  the 
moral  man,  the  complete  man,  is  more  and  more 
giving  way,  almost  without  knowing  it,  to  make 
room  for  the  political  and  the  commercial  man, 
the  man  of  the  limited  purpose.  This  process, 
aided  by  the  wonderful  progress  in  science,  is 
assuming  gigantic  proportion  and  power,  causing 
the  upset  of  man  s  moral  balance,  obscuring 
his  human  side  under  the  shadow  of  soul-less 
organization.  We  have  felt  its  iron  grip  at  the 
root  of  our  life,  and  for  the  sake  of  humanity 
we  must  stand  up  and  give  warning  to  all,  that 
this  nationalism  is  a  cruel  epidemic  of  evil  that 
is  sweeping  over  the  human  world  of  the  present 
age,  and  eating  into  its  moral  vitahty. 

I  have  a  deep  love  and  a  great  respect  for  the 
British  race  as  human  beings.  It  has  produced 
great-hearted  men,  thinkers  of  great  thoughts, 
doers  of  great  deeds.     It  has  given  rise  to  a 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     17 

great  literature.  I  know  that  these  people  love 
justice  and  freedom,  and  hate  lies.  They  are 
clean  in  their  minds,  frank  in  their  manners,  true 
in  their  friendships  ;  in  their  behaviour  they  are 
honest  and  reliable.  The  personal  experience 
which  I  have  had  of  their  literary  men  has 
roused  my  admiration  not  merely  for  their  power 
of  thought  or  expression  but  for  their  chivalrous 
humanity.  We  have  felt  the  greatness  of  this 
people  as  we  feel  the  sun  ;  but  as  for  the  Nation, 
it  is  for  us  a  thick  mist  of  a  stifling  nature 
covering  the  sun  itself. 

This  government  by  the  Nation  is  neither 
British  nor  anything  else ;  it  is  an  applied 
science  and  therefore  more  or  less  similar  in  its 
principles  wherever  it  is  used.  It  is  like  a 
hydraulic  press,  whose  pressure  is  impersonal, 
and  on  that  account  completely  effective.  The 
amount  of  its  power  may  vary  in  different 
engines.  Some  may  even  be  driven  by  hand, 
thus  leaving  a  margin  of  comfortable  looseness 
in  their  tension,  but  in  spirit  and  in  method  their 
differences  are  small.  Our  government  might 
have  been  Dutch,  or  French,  or  Portuguese,  and 
its  essential  features  would  have  remained  much 
the  same  as  they  are  now.  Only  perhaps,  in 
some   cases,   the   organization   might   not   have 


18  NATIONALISM 

been  so  densely  perfect,  and,  therefore,  some 
shreds  of  the  human  might  still  have  been 
clinging  to  the  wreck,  allowing  us  to  deal  with 
something  which  resembles  our  own  throbbing 
heart. 

Before  the  Nation  came  to  rule  over  us  we 
had  other  governments  which  were  foreign,  and 
these,  like  all  governments,  had  some  element 
of  the  machine  in  them.  But  the  difference 
between  them  and  the  government  by  the  Nation 
is  like  the  diiFerence  between  the  hand-loom  and 
the  power-loom.  In  the  products  of  the  hand- 
loom  the  magic  of  man's  living  fingers  finds  its 
expression,  and  its  hum  harmonizes  with  the 
music  of  life.  But  the  power-loom  is  relent- 
lessly lifeless  and  accurate  and  monotonous  in 
its  production. 

We  must  admit  that  during  the  personal 
government  of  the  former  days  there  have  been 
instances  of  tyranny,  injustice  and  extortion. 
They  caused  sufferings  and  unrest  from  which 
we  are  glad  to  be  rescued.  The  protection  of 
law  is  not  only  a  boon,  but  it  is  a  valuable  lesson 
to  us.  It  is  teaching  us  the  discipline  which  is 
necessary  for  the  stability  of  civilization  and  for 
continuity  of  progress.  We  are  realizing  through 
it  that  there  is  a  universal  standard  of  justice  to 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     19 

which  all  men,  irrespective  of  their  caste   and 
colour,  have  their  equal  claim. 

This  reign  of  law  in  our  present  Government 
in  India  has  established  order  in  this  vast  land 
inhabited  by  peoples  different  in  their  races  and 
customs.  It  has  made  it  possible  for  these 
peoples  to  come  in  closer  touch  with  one  another 
and  cultivate  a  communion  of  aspiration. 

But  this  desire  for  a  common  bond  of  comrade- 
ship among  the  different  races  of  India  has  been 
the  work  of  the  spirit  of  the  West,  not  that  of 
the  Nation  of  the  West.  Wherever  in  Asia  the 
people  have  received  the  true  lesson  of  the  West 
it  is  in  spite  of  the  Western  Nation.  Only 
because  Japan  had  been  able  to  resist  the  domin- 
ance of  this  Western  Nation  could  she  acquire 
the  benefit  of  the  Western  Civilization  in  fullest 
measure.  Though  China  has  been  poisoned  at 
the  very  spring  of  her  moral  and  physical  life  by 
this  Nation,  her  struggle  to  receive  the  best 
lessons  of  the  West  may  yet  be  successful  if  not 
hindered  by  the  Nation.  It  was  only  the  other 
day  that  Persia  woke  up  from  her  age-long  sleep 
at  the  call  of  the  West  to  be  instantly  trampled 
into  stillness  by  the  Nation.  The  same  pheno- 
menon prevails  in  this  country  also,  where  the 
people  are  hospitable,  but  the  Nation  has  proved 


20  NATIONALISM 

itself  to  be  otherwise,  making  an  Eastern  guest 
feel  humiliated  to  stand  before  you  as  a  member 
of  the  humanity  of  his  own  motherland. 

In  India  we  are  suffering  from  this  conflict 
between  the  spirit  of  the  West  and  the  Nation  of 
the  West.  The  benefit  of  the  Western  civiliza- 
tion is  doled  out  to  us  in  a  miserly  measure  by 
the  Nation,  which  tries  to  regulate  the  degree 
of  nutrition  as  near  the  zero-point  of  vitality  as 
possible.  The  portion  of  education  allotted  to 
us  is  so  raggedly  insufficient  that  it  ought  to 
outrage  the  sense  of  decency  of  a  Western 
humanity.  We  have  seen  in  these  countries 
how  the  people  are  encouraged  and  trained  and 
given  every  facility  to  fit  themselves  for  the 
great  movements  of  commerce  and  industry 
spreading  over  the  world,  while  in  India  the  only 
assistance  we  get  is  merely  to  be  jeered  at  by  the 
Nation  for  lagging  behind.  While  depriving  us 
of  our  opportunities  and  reducing  our  education 
to  the  minimum  required  for  conducting  a  foreign 
government,  this  Nation  pacifies  its  conscience  by 
calling  us  names,  by  sedulously  giving  currency 
to  the  arrogant  cynicism  that  the  East  is  east 
and  the  West  is  west  and  never  the  twain  shall 
meet.  If  we  must  believe  our  schoolmaster  in 
his  taunt  that,  after  nearly  two  centuries  of  his 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     21 

tutelage,  India  not  only  remains  unfit  for  self- 
government  but  unable  to  display  originality  in 
her  intellectual  attainments,  must  we  ascribe  it 
to  something  in  the  nature  of  Western  culture 
and  our  inherent  incapacity  to  receive  it  or  to 
the  judicious  niggardliness  of  the  Nation  that 
has  taken  upon  itself  the  white  man's  burden  of 
civilizing  the  East  ?  That  Japanese  people  have 
some  qualities  which  we  lack  we  may  admit,  but 
that  our  intellect  is  naturally  unproductive  com- 
pared to  theirs  we  cannot  accept  even  from  them 
whom  it  is  dangerous  for  us  to  contradict. 

The  truth  is  that  the  spirit  of  conflict  and 
conquest  is  at  the  origin  and  in  the  centre  of 
Western  nationalism ;  its  basis  is  not  social  co- 
operation. It  has  evolved  a  perfect  organization 
of  power,  but  not  spiritual  idealism.  It  is  like 
the  pack  of  predatory  creatures  that  must  have 
its  victims.  With  all  its  heart  it  cannot  bear  to 
see  its  hunting-grounds  converted  into  cultivated 
fields.  In  fact,  these  nations  are  fighting  among 
themselves  for  the  extension  of  their  victims  and 
their  reserve  forests.  Therefore  the  Western 
Nation  acts  like  a  dam  to  check  the  free  flow 
of  Western  civilization  into  the  country  of  the 
No -Nation.  Because  this  civilization  is  the 
civilization  of  power,  therefore   it  is  exclusive, 


22  NATIONALISM 

it  is  naturally  unwilling  to  open  its  sources  of 
power  to  those  whom  it  has  selected  for  its 
purposes  of  exploitation. 

But  all  the  same  moral  law  is  the  law  of 
humanity,  and  the  exclusive  civilization  which 
thrives  upon  others  who  are  barred  from  its 
benefit  carries  its  own  death  -  sentence  in  its 
moral  limitations.  The  slavery  that  it  gives  rise 
to  unconsciously  drains  its  own  love  of  freedom 
dry.  The  helplessness  with  which  it  weighs 
down  its  world  of  victims  exerts  its  force  of 
gravitation  every  moment  upon  the  power  that 
creates  it.  And  the  greater  part  of  the  world 
which  is  being  denuded  of  its  self-sustaining  life 
by  the  Nation  will  one  day  become  the  most 
terrible  of  all  its  burdens,  ready  to  drag  it  down 
into  the  bottom  of  destruction.  Whenever 
Power  removes  all  checks  from  its  path  to  make 
its  career  easy,  it  triumphantly  rides  into  its 
ultimate  crash  of  death.  Its  moral  brake 
becomes  slacker  every  day  without  its  knowing 
it,  and  its  slippery  path  of  ease  becomes  its  path 
of  doom. 

Of  all  things  in  Western  civilization,  those 
which  this  Western  Nation  has  given  us  in  a 
most  generous  measure  are  law  and  order.  While 
the   small   feeding-bottle    of   our    education    is 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     23 

nearly  dry,  and  sanitation  sucks  its  own  thumb 
in  despair,  the  military  organization,  the  magis- 
terial offices,  the  police,  the  Criminal  Investiga- 
tion Department,  the  secret  spy  system,  attain 
to  an  abnormal  girth  in  their  waists,  occupying 
every  inch  of  our  covmtry.  This  is  to  maintain 
order.  But  is  not  this  order  merely  a  negative 
good  ?  Is  it  not  for  giving  people's  life  greater 
opportunities  for  the  freedom  of  development  ? 
Its  perfection  is  the  perfection  of  an  egg-shell, 
whose  true  value  lies  in  the  security  it  affords  to 
the  chick  and  its  nourishment  and  not  in  the 
convenience  it  offers  to  the  person  at  the  breakfast 
table.  Mere  administration  is  unproductive, 
it  is  not  creative,  not  being  a  living  thing.  It 
is  a  steam-roller,  formidable  in  its  weight  and 
power,  having  its  uses,  but  it  does  not  help  the 
soil  to  become  fertile.  When  after  its  enormous 
toil  it  comes  to  offer  us  its  boon  of  peace  we  can 
but  murmur  under  our  breath  that  "peace  is 
good,  but  not  more  so  than  life,  which  is  God's 
own  great  boon." 

On  the  other  hand,  our  former  governments 
were  woefully  lacking  in  many  of  the  advantages 
of  the  modern  government.  But  because  those 
were  not  the  governments  by  the  Nation,  their 
texture   was   loosely   woven,    leaving   big   gaps 


24  NATIONALISM 

through  which  our  own  life  sent  its  threads  and 
imposed  its  designs.  I  am  quite  sure  in  those 
days  we  had  things  that  were  extremely  distaste- 
ful to  us.  But  we  know  that  when  we  walk 
barefooted  upon  ground  strewn  with  gravel, 
our  feet  come  gradually  to  adjust  themselves  to 
the  caprices  of  the  inhospitable  earth ;  while  if 
the  tiniest  particle  of  gravel  finds  its  lodgment 
inside  our  shoes  we  can  never  forget  and  forgive 
its  intrusion.  And  these  shoes  are  the  govern- 
ment by  the  Nation, — it  is  tight,  it  regulates 
our  steps  with  a  closed-up  system,  within  which 
our  feet  have  only  the  slightest  liberty  to  make 
their  own  adjustments.  Therefore,  when  you 
produce  your  statistics  to  compare  the  number 
of  gravels  which  our  feet  had  Jo  encounter  in 
former  days  with  the  paucity  in  the  present 
regime,  they  hardly  touch  the  real  points.  It  is 
not  a  question  of  the  number  of  outside  obstacles 
but  the  comparative  powerlessness  of  the  indi- 
vidual to  cope  with  them.  This  narrowness  of 
freedom  is  an  evil  which  is  more  radical,  not 
because  of  its  quantity  but  because  of  its  nature. 
And  we  cannot  but  acknowledge  this  paradox, 
that  while  the  spirit  of  the  West  marches  under 
its  banner  of  freedom,  the  Nation  of  the  West 
forges  its  iron  chains  of  organization  which  are 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     25 

the  most  relentless  and  unbreakable  that  have 
ever  been  manufactured  hi  the  whole  history  of 
man. 

When  the  humanity  of  India  was  not  under 
the  government  of  the  Organization,  the  elas- 
ticity of  change  was  great  enough  to  encourage 
men  of  power  and  spirit  to  feel  that  they  had 
their  destinies  in  their  own  hands.  The  hope 
of  the  unexpected  was  never  absent,  and  a  freer 
play  of  imagination,  on  the  part  both  of  the 
governor  and  the  governed,  had  its  effect  in 
the  making  of  history.  We  were  not  confronted 
with  a  future,  which  was  a  dead  white  wall  of 
granite  blocks  eternally  guarding  against  the 
expression  and  extension  of  our  own  powers, 
the  hopelessness  of  which  lies  in  the  reason 
that  these  powers  are  becoming  atrophied  at 
their  very  roots  by  the  scientific  process  of 
paralysis.  For  every  single  individual  in  the 
country  of  the  No-Nation  is  completely  in  the 
grip  of  a  whole  nation, — whose  tireless  vigilance, 
being  the  vigilance  of  a  machine,  has  not  the 
human  power  to  overlook  or  to  discriminate. 
At  the  least  pressing  of  its  button  the  monster 
organization  becomes  all  eyes,  whose  ugly  stare 
of  inquisitiveness  cannot  be  avoided  by  a  single 
person  amongst  the  immense  multitude  of  the 


26  NATIONALISM 

ruled.  At  the  least  turn  of  its  screw,  by  the 
fraction  of  an  inch,  the  grip  is  tightened  to  the 
point  of  suffocation  around  every  man,  woman 
and  child  of  a  vast  population,  for  whom  no 
escape  is  imaginable  in  their  own  country,  or 
even  in  any  country  outside  their  own. 

It  is  the  continual  and  stupendous  dead 
pressure  of  this  inhuman  upon  the  living  human 
under  which  the  modern  world  is  groaning. 
Not  merely  the  subject  races,  but  you  who  live 
under  the  delusion  that  you  are  free,  are  every 
day  sacrificing  your  freedom  and  humanity  to 
this  fetich  of  nationalism,  living  in  the  dense 
poisonous  atmosphere  of  world  -  wide  suspicion 
and  greed  and  panic. 

I  have  seen  in  Japan  the  voluntary  submission 
of  the  whole  people  to  the  trimming  of  their 
minds  and  clipping  of  their  freedom  by  their 
government,  which  through  various  educational 
agencies  regulates  their  thoughts,  manufactures 
their  feelings,  becomes  suspiciously  watchful 
when  they  show  signs  of  inclining  toward  the 
spiritual,  leading  them  through  a  narrow  path 
not  toward  what  is  true  but  what  is  necessary 
for  the  complete  welding  of  them  into  one 
uniform  mass  according  to  its  own  recipe.  The 
people  accept  this  all-pervading  mental  slavery 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     27 

with  cheerfulness  and  pride  because  of  their 
nervous  desire  to  turn  themselves  into  a  machine 
of  power,  called  the  Nation,  and  emulate  other 
machines  in  their  collective  worldliness. 

When  questioned  as  to  the  wisdom  of  its 
course  the  newly  converted  fanatic  of  nationalism 
answers  that  "so  long  as  nations  are  rampant 
in  this  world  we  have  not  the  option  freely  to 
develop  our  higher  humanity.  We  must  utilize 
every  faculty  that  we  possess  to  resist  the  evil 
by  assuming  it  ourselves  in  the  fullest  degree. 
For  the  only  brotherhood  possible  in  the  modern 
world  is  the  brotherhood  of  hooliganism."  The 
recognition  of  the  fraternal  bond  of  love  between 
Japan  and  Russia,  which  has  lately  been  cele- 
brated with  an  immense  display  of  rejoicing  in 
Japan,  was  not  owing  to  any  sudden  recrudescence 
of  the  spirit  of  Christianity  or  of  Buddhism, 
but  it  was  a  bond  established  according  to  the 
modern  faith  in  a  surer  relationship  of  mutual 
menace  of  bloodshedding.  Yes,  one  cannot  but 
acknowledge  that  these  facts  are  the  facts  of  the 
world  of  the  Nation,  and  the  only  moral  of  it  is 
that  all  the  peoples  of  the  earth  should  strain 
their  physical,  moral  and  intellectual  resources 
to  the  utmost  to  defeat  one  another  in  the 
wrestling  match  of  powerfulness.    In  the  ancient 


/ 


28  NATIONALISM 

days  Sparta  paid  all  her  attention  to  becoming 
powerful ;  she  did   become  so   by  crippling  her 

i      humanity,  and  died  of  the  amputation. 

But  it  is  no  consolation  to  us  to  know  that 
the  weakening  of  humanity  from  which  the 
present  age  is  suffering  is  not  limited  to  the  sub- 
ject races,  and  that  its  ravages  are  even  more 
radical  because  insidious  and  voluntary  in  peoples 

\  who  are  hypnotized  into  believing  that  they  are 
free.  This  bartering  of  your  higher  aspirations 
of  life  for  profit  and  power  has  been  your  own 
free  choice,  and  I  leave  you  there,  at  the  wreck- 
age of  your  soul,  contemplating  your  protuberant 
prosperity.  But  will  you  never  be  called  to 
answer  for  organizing  the  instincts  of  self- 
aggrandizement  of  whole  peoples  into  perfection 
j  and  calling  it  good  ?  I  ask  you  what  disaster 
has  there  ever  been  in  the  history  of  man,  in  its 
darkest  period,  like  this  terrible  disaster  of  the 
Nation  fixing  its  fangs  deep  into  the  naked  flesh 
of  the  world,  taking  permanent  precautions 
against  its  natural  relaxation  ? 

You,  the  people  of  the  West,  who  have 
manufactured  this  abnormality,  can  you  imagine 
the  desolating  despair  of  this  haunted  world  of 
suffering  man  possessed  by  the  ghastly  abstrac- 
tion of  the  organizing  man  ?     Can  you  put  your- 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     29 

self  into  the  position  of  the  peoples,  who  seem 
to  have  been  doomed  to  an  eternal  damnation  of 
their  own  humanity,  who  not  only  must  suffer 
continual  curtailment  of  tlieir  manhood,  but 
even  raise  their  voices  in  peeans  of  praise  for 
the  benignity  of  a  mechanical  apparatus  in  its 
interminable  parody  of  providence  ? 

Have  you  not  seen,  since  the  commencement 
of  the  existence  of  the  Nation,  that  the  dread  of 
it  has  been  the  one  goblin -dread  with  which  the 
whole  world  has  been  trembling  ?  Wherever 
there  is  a  dark  corner,  there  is  the  suspicion  of 
its  secret  malevolence ;  and  people  live  in  a  per- 
petual distrust  of  its  back  where  it  has  no  eyes. 
Every  sound  of  a  footstep,  every  rustle  of  move- 
ment in  the  neighbourhood,  sends  a  thrill  of 
terror  all  around.  And  this  terror  is  the  parent 
of  all  that  is  base  in  man's  nature.  It  makes 
one  almost  openly  unashamed  of  inhumanity. 
Clever  lies  become  matters  of  self-congratulation. 
Solemn  pledges  become  a  farce, — laughable  for 
their  very  solemnity.  The  Nation,  with  all  its 
paraphernalia  of  power  and  prosperity,  its  flags 
and  pious  hymns,  its  blasphemous  prayers  in  the 
churches,  and  the  literary  mock  thunders  of  its 
patriotic  bragging,  cannot  hide  the  fact  that  the 
Nation  is  the  greatest  evil  for  the  Nation,  that 


30  NATIONALISM 

all  its  precautions  are  against  it,  and  any  new 
birth  of  its  fellow  in  the  world  is  always  followed 
in  its  mind  by  the  dread  of  a  new  peril.  Its  one 
wish  is  to  trade  on  the  feebleness  of  the  rest  of 
the  world,  like  some  insects  that  are  bred  in  the 
paralysed  flesh  of  victims  kept  just  enough  alive 
to  make  them  toothsome  and  nutritious.  There- 
fore it  is  ready  to  send  its  poisonous  fluid  into 
the  vitals  of  the  other  living  peoples,  who,  not 
being  nations,  are  harmless.  For  this  the  Nation 
has  had  and  still  has  its  richest  pasture  in  Asia. 
Great  China,  rich  with  her  ancient  wisdom  and 
social  ethics,  her  discipline  of  industry  and  self- 
control,  is  like  a  whale  awakening  the  lust  of 
spoil  in  the  heart  of  the  Nation.  She  is  already 
carrying  in  her  quivering  flesh  harpoons  sent  by 
the  unerring  aim  of  the  Nation,  the  creature  of 
science  and  selfishness.  Her  pitiful  attempt  to 
shake  off  her  traditions  of  humanity,  her  social 
ideals,  and  spend  her  last  exhausted  resources  in 
drilling  herself  into  modern  efficiency,  is  thwarted 
at  every  step  by  the  Nation.  It  is  tightening 
its  financial  ropes  round  her,  trying  to  drag  her 
up  on  the  shore  and  cut  her  into  pieces,  and 
then  go  and  offer  public  thanksgiving  to  God  for 
supporting  the  one  existing  evil  and  shattering 
the  possibility  of  a  new  one.     And  for  all  this 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     31 

the  Nation  has  been  claiming  the  gratitude  of 
history,  and  all  eternity  for  its  exploitation ; 
ordering  its  band  of  praise  to  be  struck  up  from 
end  to  end  of  the  world,  declaring  itself  to  be  the 
salt  of  the  earth,  the  flower  of  humanity,  the 
blessing  of  God  hurled  with  all  His  force  upon 
the  naked  skulls  of  the  world  of  No-Nations. 

I  know  what  your  advice  will  be.  You  will 
say,  form  yourselves  into  a  nation,  and  resist  this 
encroachment  of  the  Nation.  But  is  this  the 
true  advice  ?  that  of  a  man  to  a  man  ?  Why 
should  this  be  a  necessity  ?  I  could  well  believe 
you  if  you  had  said,  Be  more  good,  more  just, 
more  true  in  your  relation  to  man,  control  your 
greed,  make  your  life  wholesome  in  its  sim- 
plicity and  let  your  consciousness  of  the  divine 
in  humanity  be  more  perfect  in  its  expression. 
But  must  you  say  that  it  is  not  the  soul,  but  the 
machine,  which  is  of  the  utmost  value  to  our- 
selves, and  that  man's  salvation  depends  upon 
his  disciplining  himself  into  a  perfection  of  the 
dead  rhythm  of  wheels  and  counterwheels  ?  that 
machine  must  be  pitted  against  machine,  and 
nation  against  nation,  in  an  endless  bull-fight  of 
politics  ? 

You  say,  these  machines  will  come  into  an 
agreement,  for   their   mutual   protection,  based 


32  NATIONALISM 

upon  a  conspiracy  of  fear.  But  will  this  federa- 
tion of  steam-boilers  supply  you  with  a  soul,  a 
soul  which  has  her  conscience  and  her  God  ? 
What  is  to  happen  to  that  larger  part  of  the 
world  where  fear  will  have  no  hand  in  restraining 
you  ?  Whatever  safety  they  now  enjoy,  those 
countries  of  No-Nation,  from  the  unbridled  license 
of  forge  and  hammer  and  turn-screw,  results  from 
the  mutual  jealousy  of  the  powers.  But  when, 
instead  of  being  numerous  separate  machines, 
they  become  riveted  into  one  organized  gre- 
gariousness  of  gluttony,  commercial  and  political, 
what  remotest  chance  of  hope  will  remain  for 
those  others,  who  have  lived  and  suffered,  have 
loved  and  worshipped,  have  thought  deeply  and 
worked  with  meekness,  but  whose  only  crime 
has  been  that  they  have  not  organized  ? 

But,  you  say,  ''That  does  not  matter,  the 
unfit  must  go  to  the  wall — they  shall  die,  and 
this  is  science." 

No,  for  the  sake  of  your  own  salvation,  I  say, 
they  shall  live,  and  this  is  truth.  It  is  extremely 
bold  of  me  to  say  so,  but  I  assert  that  man's 
world  is  a  moral  world,  not  because  we  blindly 
agree  to  believe  it,  but  because  it  is  so  in  truth 
which  would  be  dangerous  for  us  to  ignore.  And 
this  moral  nature  of  man  cannot  be  divided  into 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     33 

convenient  compartments  for  its  preservation. 
You  cannot  secure  it  for  your  home  consump- 
tion with  protective  tariff  walls,  while  in  foreign 
parts  making  it  enormously  accommodating  in 
its  free  trade  of  license. 

Has  not  this  truth  already  come  home  to  you 
now,  when  this  cruel  war  has  driven  its  claws 
into  the  vitals  of  Europe  ?  when  her  hoard  of 
wealth  is  bursting  into  smoke  and  her  humanity 
is  shattered  into  bits  on  her  battlefields  ?  You 
ask  in  amazement  what  has  she  done  to  deserve 
this  ?  The  answer  is,  that  the  West  has  been 
systematically  petrifying  her  moral  nature  in 
order  to  lay  a  solid  foundation  for  her  gigantic 
abstractions  of  efficiency.  She  has  all  along 
been  starving  the  life  of  the  personal  man  into 
that  of  the  professional. 

In  your  mediaeval  age  in  Europe,  the  simple 
and  the  natural  man,  with  all  his  violent  passions 
and  desires,  was  engaged  in  trying  to  find  out  a 
reconciliation  in  the  conflict  between  the  flesh 
and  the  spirit.  All  through  the  turbulent  career 
of  her  vigorous  youth  the  temporal  and  the 
spiritual  forces  both  acted  strongly  upon  her 
nature,  and  were  moulding  it  into  completeness 
of  moral  personality.  Europe  owes  all  her  great- 
ness in  humanity  to  that  period  of  discipline, 

D 


34  NATIONALISM 

— the    discipline    of    the    man    in    his    human 
integrity. 

Then  came  the  age  of  intellect,  of  science. 
A^'^e  all  know  that  intellect  is  impersonal.  Our 
life,  and  our  heart,  are  one  with  us,  but  our  mind 
can  be  detached  from  the  personal  man  and  then 
only  can  it  freely  move  in  its  world  of  thoughts. 
Our  intellect  is  an  ascetic  who  wears  no  clothes, 
takes  no  food,  knows  no  sleep,  has  no  wishes, 
feels  no  love  or  hatred  or  pity  for  human  limita- 
tions, who  only  reasons^  unmoved,  through  the 
vicissitudes  of  life.  It  burrows  to  the  roots  of 
things,  because  it  has  no  personal  concern  with 
the  thing  itself  The  grammarian  walks  straight 
through  all  poetry  and  goes  to  the  root  of  words 
without  obstruction,  because  he  is  not  seeking 
reality,  but  law.  When  he  finds  the  law,  he  is 
able  to  teach  people  how  to  master  words.  This 
is  a  power, — the  power  which  fulfils  some  special 
usefulness,  some  particular  need  of  man. 

Reality  is  the  harmony  which  gives  to  the 
component  parts  of  a  thing  the  equilibrium  of 
the  whole.  You  break  it,  and  have  in  your 
hands  the  nomadic  atoms  fighting  against  one 
another,  therefore  unmeaning.  Those  who  covet 
power  try  to  get  mastery  of  these  aboriginal 
fighting    elements,    and   through    some   narrow 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     35 

channels  force  them  into  some  violent  service 
for  some  particular  needs  of  man. 

This  satisfaction  of  man's  needs  is  a  great 
thing.  It  gives  him  freedom  in  the  material 
world.  It  confers  on  him  the  benefit  of  a 
greater  range  of  time  and  space.  He  can  do 
things  in  a  shorter  time  and  occupies  a  larger 
space  with  more  thoroughness  of  advantage. 
Therefore  he  can  easily  outstrip  those  who  live 
in  a  world  of  a  slower  time  and  of  space  less 
fully  occupied. 

This  progress  of  power  attains  more  and 
more  rapidity  of  pace.  And,  for  the  reason 
that  it  is  a  detached  part  of  man,  it  soon  out- 
runs the  complete  humanity.  The  moral  man 
remains  behind,  because  it  has  to  deal  with  the 
whole  reality,  not  merely  with  the  law  of  things, 
which  is  impersonal  and  therefore  abstract. 

Thus,  man  with  his  mental  and  material 
power  far  outgrowing  his  moral  strength,  is 
like  an  exaggerated  giraffe  whose  head  has 
suddenly  shot  up  miles  away  from  the  rest  of 
him,  making  normal  communication  difficult  to 
establish.  This  greedy  head,  with  its  huge 
dental  organization,  has  been  munching  all  the 
topmost  foliage  of  the  world,  but  the  nourish- 
ment is  too  late  in  reaching  his  digestive  organs. 


36  NATIONALISM 

and  his  heart  is  suffering  from  want  of  blood. 
Of  this  present  disharmony  in  man's  nature  the 
West  seems  to  have  been  blissfully  unconscious. 
The  enormity  of  its  material  success  has  diverted 
all  its  attention  toward  self-congratulation  on 
its  bulk.  The  optimism  of  its  logic  goes  on 
basing  the  calculations  of  its  good  fortune  upon 
the  indefinite  prolongation  of  its  railway  lines 
toward  eternity.  It  is  superficial  enough  to 
think  that  all  to-morrows  are  merely  to-days, 
with  the  repeated  additions  of  twenty  -  four 
hours.  It  has  no  fear  of  the  chasm,  which  is 
opening  wider  every  day,  between  man's  ever- 
growing storehouses  and  the  emptiness  of  his 
hungry  humanity.  Logic  does  not  know  that, 
under  the  lowest  bed  of  endless  strata  of  wealth 
and  comforts,  earthquakes  are  being  hatched  to 
restore  the  balance  of  the  moral  world,  and  one 
day  the  gaping  gulf  of  spiritual  vacuity  will 
draw  into  its  bottom  the  store  of  things  that 
have  their  eternal  love  for  the  dust. 

Man  in  his  fulness  is  not  powerful,  but 
perfect.  Therefore,  to  turn  him  into  mere 
power,  you  have  to  curtail  his  soul  as  much  as 
possible.  When  we  are  fully  human,  we  cannot 
fly  at  one  another's  throats ;  our  instincts  of 
social  life,  our  traditions  of  moral  ideals  stand 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     37 

in  the  way.  If  you  want  me  to  take  to  butcher- 
ing human  beings,  you  must  break  up  that 
wholeness  of  my  humanity  through  some 
discipline  which  makes  my  will  dead,  my 
thoughts  numb,  my  movements  automatic, 
and  then  from  the  dissolution  of  the  complex 
personal  man  will  come  out  that  abstraction, 
that  destructive  force,  which  has  no  relation  to 
human  truth,  and  therefore  can  be  easily  brutal 
or  mechanical.  Take  away  man  from  his  natural 
surroundings,  from  the  fulness  of  his  communal 
life,  with  all  its  living  associations  of  beauty  and 
love  and  social  obligations,  and  you  will  be  able 
to  turn  him  into  so  many  fragments  of  a  machine 
for  the  production  of  wealth  on  a  gigantic  scale. 
Turn  a  tree  into  a  log  and  it  will  burn  for  you, 
but  it  will  never  bear  living  flowers  ^nd  fruit. 

This  process  of  dehumanizing  has  been  going 
on  in  commerce  and  politics.  And  out  of  the 
long  birth-throes  of  mechanical  energy  has  been 
born  this  fully  developed  apparatus  of  magnificent 
power  and  surprising  appetite  which  has  been 
christened  in  the  West  as  the  Nation.  As  I 
have  hinted  before,  because  of  its  quality  of 
abstraction  it  has,  with  the  greatest  ease,  gone 
far  ahead  of  the  complete  moral  man.  And 
having  the  conscience  of  a  ghost  and  the  callous 


38  NATIONALISM 

perfection  of  an  automaton,  it  is  causing  disasters 
of  which  the  volcanic  dissipations  of  the  youth- 
ful moon  would  be  ashamed  to  be  brought  into 
comparison.  As  a  result,  the  suspicion  of  man 
for  man  stings  all  the  limbs  of  this  civilization 
like  the  hairs  of  the  nettle.  Each  country  is 
casting  its  net  of  espionage  into  the  slimy 
bottom  of  the  others,  fishing  for  their  secrets, 
the  treacherous  secrets  which  brew  in  the  oozy 
depths  of  diplomacy.  And  what  is  their  secret 
service  but  the  nation's  underground  trade  in 
kidnapping,  murder  and  treachery  and  all  the 
ugly  crimes  bred  in  the  depth  of  rottenness  ? 
Because  each  nation  has  its  own  history  of 
thieving  and  lies  and  broken  faith,  therefore 
there  can  only  flourish  international  suspicion 
and  jealousy,  and  international  moral  shame 
becomes  anaemic  to  a  degree  of  ludicrousness. 
The  nation's  bagpipe  of  righteous  indignation 
has  so  often  changed  its  tune  according  to  the 
variation  of  time  and  to  the  altered  groupings 
of  the  alliances  of  diplomacy,  that  it  can  be 
enjoyed  with  amusement  as  the  variety  per- 
formance of  the  political  music  hall. 

I  am  just  coming  from  my  visit  to  Japan, 
where  1  exhorted  this  young  nation  to  take  its 
stand  upon  the  higher   ideals  of  humanity  and 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     39 

never  to  follow  the  West  in  its  acceptance  of 
the  organized  selfishness  of  Nationalism  as  its 
religion,  never  to  gloat  upon  the  feebleness  of 
its  neighbours,  never  to  be  unscrupulous  in  its 
behaviour  to  the  weak,  where  it  can  be  gloriously 
mean  with  impunity,  while  turning  its  right 
cheek  of  brighter  humanity  for  the  kiss  of  admira- 
tion to  those  who  have  the  power  to  deal  it  a 
blow.  Some  of  the  newspapers  praised  my  utter- 
ances for  their  poetical  qualities,  while  adding 
with  a  leer  that  it  was  the  poetry  of  a  defeated 
people.  I  felt  they  were  right.  Japan  had  been 
taught  in  a  modern  school  the  lesson  how  to 
become  powerful.  The  schooling  is  done  and 
she  must  enjoy  the  fruits  of  her  lessons.  The 
West  in  the  voice  of  her  thundering  cannon  had 
said  at  the  door  of  Japan,  Let  there  be  a  nation 
— and  there  was  a  Nation.  And  now  that  it  has 
come  into  existence,  why  do  you  not  feel  in  your 
heart  of  hearts  a  pure  feeling  of  gladness  and  say 
that  it  is  good  ?  Why  is  it  that  I  saw  in  an 
English  paper  an  expression  of  bitterness  at 
Japan's  boasting  of  her  superiority  of  civilization 
— the  thing  that  the  British,  along  with  other 
nations,  has  been  carrying  on  for  ages  without 
blushing  ?  Because  the  idealism  of  selfishness 
must  keep  itself  drunk  with  a  continual  dose  of 


40  NATIONALISM 

self-laudation.  But  the  same  vices  which  seem 
so  natural  and  innocuous  in  its  own  life  make  it 
surprised  and  angry  at  their  unpleasantness  when 
seen  in  other  nations.  Therefore,  when  you  see 
the  Japanese  nation,  created  in  your  own  image, 
launched  in  its  career  of  national  boastfulness 
you  shake  your  head  and  say,  it  is  not  good. 
Has  it  not  been  one  of  the  causes  that  raise  the 
cry  on  these  shores  for  preparedness  to  meet  one 
more  power  of  evil  with  a  greater  power  of 
injury  ?  Japan  protests  that  she  has  her  bushido, 
that  she  can  never  be  treacherous  to  America,  to 
whom  she  owes  her  gratitude.  But  you  find  it 
difficult  to  believe  her, — for  the  wisdom  of  the 
Nation  is  not  in  its  faith  in  humanity  but  in  its 
complete  distrust.  You  say  to  yourself  that  it 
is  not  with  Japan  of  the  bushido,  the  Japan  of 
the  moral  ideals,  that  you  have  to  deal — it  is  with 
the  abstraction  of  the  popular  selfishness,  it  is 
with  the  Nation ;  and  Nation  can  only  trust 
Nation  where  their  interests  coalesce,  or  at  least 
do  not  conflict.  In  fact  your  instinct  tells  you 
that  the  advent  of  another  people  into  the  arena 
of  nationality  makes  another  addition  to  the  evil 
which  contradicts  all  that  is  highest  in  Man  and 
proves  by  its  success  that  unscrupulousness  is 
the  way  to  prosperity, — and   goodness  is  good 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     41 

for  the  weak  and  God  is  the  only  remaining 
consolation  of  the  defeated. 

Yes,  this  is  the  logic  of  the  Nation.  And  it 
will  never  heed  the  voice  of  truth  and  goodness. 
It  will  go  on  in  its  ring-dance  of  moral  corrup- 
tion, linking  steel  unto  steel,  and  machine  unto 
machine  ;  trampling  under  its  tread  all  the  sweet 
flowers  of  simple  faith  and  the  living  ideals  of 
man. 

But  we  delude  ourselves  into  thinking  that 
humanity  in  the  modern  days  is  more  to  the 
front  than  ever  before.  The  reason  of  this  self- 
delusion  is  because  man  is  served  with  the  neces- 
saries of  life  in  greater  profusion,  and  his  physical 
ills  are  being  alleviated  with  more  efficacy.  But 
the  chief  part  of  this  is  done,  not  by  moral  sacri- 
fice, but  by  intellectual  power.  In  quantity  it  is 
great,  but  it  springs  from  the  surface  and  spreads 
over  the  surface.  Knowledge  and  efficiency  are 
powerful  in  their  outward  effect,  but  they  are 
the  servants  of  man,  not  the  man  himself.  Their 
service  is  like  the  service  in  a  hotel,  where  it  is 
elaborate,  but  the  host  is  absent ;  it  is  more 
convenient  than  hospitable. 

Therefore  we  must  not  forget  that  the 
scientific  organizations  vastly  spreading  in  all 
directions  are  strengthening  our  power,  but  not 


42  NATIONALISM 

our  humanity.  With  the  growth  of  power  the 
cult  of  the  self-worship  of  the  Nation  grows  in 
ascendancy  ;  and  the  individual  willingly  allows 
the  Nation  to  take  donkey-rides  upon  his  back  ; 
and  there  happens  the  anomaly  which  must  have 
such  disastrous  effects,  that  the  individual 
worships  with  all  sacrifices  a  god  which  is  morally 
much  inferior  to  himself.  This  could  never  have 
been  possible  if  the  god  had  been  as  real  as  the 
individual. 

Let  me  give  an  illustration  of  this  in  point. 
In  some  parts  of  India  it  has  been  enjoined  as 
an  act  of  great  piety  for  a  widow  to  go  without 
food  and  water  on  a  particular  day  every  fort- 
night. This  often  leads  to  cruelty,  unmeaning 
and  inhuman.  And  yet  men  are  not  by  nature 
cruel  to  such  a  degree.  But  this  piety  being  a 
mere  unreal  abstraction  completely  deadens  the 
moral  sense  of  the  individual,  just  as  the  man, 
who  would  not  hurt  an  animal  unnecessarily, 
would  cause  horrible  suffering  to  a  large  number 
of  innocent  creatures  when  he  drugs  his  feelings 
with  the  abstract  idea  of  "  sport."  Because  these 
ideas  are  the  creations  of  our  intellect,  because 
they  are  logical  classifications,  therefore  they  can 
so  easily  hide  in  their  mist  the  personal  man. 

And  the  idea  of  the  Nation  is  one  of  the  most 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     43 

powerful  aiifiesthetics  that  man  has  mvented. 
Under  the  influence  of  its  fumes  the  whole 
people  can  carry  out  its  systematic  programme  of 
the  most  virulent  self-seeking  without  being  in 
the  least  aware  of  its  moral  perversion, — in  fact 
feeling  dangerously  resentful  if  it  is  pointed  out. 

But  can  this  go  on  indefinitely  ?  continually 
producing  barrenness  of  moral  insensibility  upon 
a  large  tract  of  our  living  nature  ?  Can  it  escape 
its  nemesis  for  ever  ?  Has  this  giant  power  of 
mechanical  organization  no  limit  in  this  world 
against  which  it  may  shatter  itself  all  the  more 
completely  because  of  its  terrible  strength  and 
velocity  ?  Do  you  believe  that  evil  can  be  per- 
manently kept  in  check  by  competition  with 
evil,  and  that  conference  of  prudence  can  keep 
the  devil  chained  in  its  makeshift  cage  of  mutual 
agreement  ? 

This  European  war  of  Nations  is  the  war  of 
retribution.  Man,  the  person,  must  protest  for 
his  very  life  against  the  heaping  up  of  things 
where  there  should  be  the  heart,  and  systems 
and  policies  where  there  should  flow  living 
human  relationship.  The  time  has  come  when, 
for  the  sake  of  the  whole  outraged  world,  Europe 
should  fully  know  in  her  own  person  the  terrible 
absurdity  of  the  thing  called  the  Nation. 


44  NATIONALISM 

The  Nation  has  thriven  long  upon  mutilated 
humanity.  Men,  the  fairest  creations  of  God, 
came  out  of  the  National  manufactory  in  huge 
numbers  as  war  -  making  and  money  -  making 
puppets,  ludicrously  vain  of  their  pitiful  perfec- 
tion of  mechanism.  Human  society  grew  more 
and  more  into  a  marionette  show  of  politicians, 
soldiers,  manufacturers  and  bureaucrats,  pulled 
by  wire  arrangements  of  wonderful  efficiency. 

But  the  apotheosis  of  selfishness  can  never 
make  its  interminable  breed  of  hatred  and  greed, 
fear  and  hypocrisy,  suspicion  and  tyranny,  an 
end  in  themselves.  These  monsters  grow  into 
huge  shapes  but  never  into  harmony.  And 
this  Nation  may  grow  on  to  an  unimaginable 
corpulence,  not  of  a  living  body,  but  of  steel 
and  steam  and  office  buildings,  till  its  deformity 
can  contain  no  longer  its  ugly  voluminousness, 
— till  it  begins  to  crack  and  gape,  breathe  gas 
and  fire  in  gasps,  and  its  death-rattles  sound 
in  cannon  roars.  In  this  war  the  death-throes  of 
the  Nation  have  commenced.  Suddenly,  all  its 
mechanism  going  mad,  it  has  begun  the  dance 
of  the  Furies,  shattering  its  own  limbs,  scattering 
them  into  the  dust.  It  is  the  fifth  act  of  the 
tragedy  of  the  unreal. 

Those  who  have  any  faith  in  Man  cannot  but 


NATIONALISM  IN  THE  WEST     45 

fervently  hope  that  the  tyranny  of  the  Nation 
will  not  be  restored  to  all  its  former  teeth  and 
claws,  to  its  far  -  reaching  iron  arms  and  its 
immense  inner  cavity,  all  stomach  and  no  heart ; 
that  man  will  have  his  new  birth,  in  the  freedom 
of  his  individuality,  from  the  enveloping  vague- 
ness of  abstraction. 

The  veil  has  been  raised,  and  in  this  frightful 
war  the  West  has  stood  face  to  face  with  her 
own  creation,  to  which  she  had  offered  her  soul. 
She  must  know  what  it  truly  is. 

She  had  never  let  herself  suspect  what  slow 
decay  and  decomposition  were  secretly  going  on 
in  her  moral  nature,  which  often  broke  out  in 
doctrines  of  scepticism,  but  still  oftener  and  in 
still  more  dangerously  subtle  manner  showed 
itself  in  her  unconsciousness  of  the  mutilation 
and  insult  that  she  had  been  inflicting  upon  a 
vast  part  of  the  world.  Now  she  must  know 
the  truth  nearer  home. 

And  then  there  will  come  from  her  own 
children  those  who  will  break  themselves  free 
from  the  slavery  of  this  illusion,  this  perversion 
of  brotherhood  founded  upon  self-seeking,  those 
who  will  own  themselves  as  God's  children  and 
as  no  bond-slaves  of  machinery,  which  turns 
souls  into  commodities  and  life  into  compart- 


46  NATIONALISM 

ments,  which,  with  its  iron  claws,  scratches  out 
the  heart  of  the  world  and  knows  not  what  it 
has  done. 

And  we  of  no  nations  of  the  world,  whose 
heads  have  been  bowed  to  the  dust,  will  know 
that  this  dust  is  more  sacred  than  the  bricks 
which  build  the  pride  of  power.  For  this  dust 
is  fertile  of  life,  and  of  beauty  and  worship. 
We  shall  thank  God  that  we  were  made  to 
wait  in  silence  through  the  night  of  despair, 
had  to  bear  the  insult  of  the  proud  and  the 
strong  man's  burden,  yet  all  through  it,  though 
our  hearts  quaked  with  doubt  and  fear,  never 
could  we  blindly  believe  in  the  salvation  which 
machinery  offered  to  man,  but  we  held  fast  to 
our  trust  in  God  and  the  truth  of  the  human 
soul.  And  we  can  still  cherish  the  hope  that, 
when  power  becomes  ashamed  to  occupy  its 
throne  and  is  ready  to  make  way  for  love, 
when  the  morning  comes  for  cleansing  the 
blood  -  stained  steps  of  the  Nation  along  the 
highroad  of  humanity,  we  shall  be  called  upon 
to  bring  our  own  vessel  of  sacred  water — the 
water  of  worship — to  sweeten  the  history  of 
man  into  purity,  and  with  its  sprinkling  make 
the  trampled  dust  of  the  centuries  blessed  with 
fruitfulness. 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN 


47 


NATIONALISM   IN  JAPAN 


The  worst  form  of  bondage  is  the  bondage  of 
dejection,  which  keeps  men  hopelessly  chained 
in  loss  of  faith  in  themselves.  We  have  been 
repeatedly  told,  with  some  justification,  that  Asia 
lives  in  the  past, — it  is  like  a  rich  mausoleum 
which  displays  all  its  magnificence  in  trying  to 
immortalize  the  dead.  It  was  said  of  Asia  that 
it  could  never  move  in  the  path  of  progress,  its 
face  was  so  inevitably  turned  backwards.  We 
accepted  this  accusation,  and  came  to  believe  it. 
In  India,  I  know,  a  large  section  of  our  educated 
community,  grown  tired  of  feeling  the  humilia- 
tion of  this  charge  against  us,  is  trying  all  its 
resources  of  self-deception  to  turn  it  into  a 
matter  of  boasting.  But  boasting  is  only  a 
masked  shame,  it  does  not  truly  believe  in  itself. 
When  things  stood  still  like  this,  and  we  in 
Asia  hypnotized   ourselves  into  the  belief  that 

49  E 


50  NATIONALISM 

it  could  never  by  any  possibility  be  otherwise, 
Japan  rose  from  her  dreams,  and  in  giant  strides 
left  centuries  of  inaction  behind,  overtaking  the 
present  time  in  its  foremost  achievement.  This 
has  broken  the  spell  under  which  we  lay  in 
torpor  for  ages,  taking  it  to  be  the  normal 
condition  of  certain  races  living  in  certain 
geographical  limits.  We  forgot  that  in  Asia 
great  kingdoms  were  founded,  philosophy,  science, 
arts  and  literatures  flourished,  and  all  the  great 
religions  of  the  world  had  their  cradles.  There- 
fore  it  cannot  be  said  that  there  is  anything 
inherent  in  the  soil  and  climate  of  Asia  to 
produce  mental  inactivity  and  to  atrophy  the 
faculties  which  impel  men  to  go  forward.  For 
centuries  we  did  hold  torches  of  civilization  in 
the  East  when  the  West  slumbered  in  darkness, 
and  that  could  never  be  the  sign  of  sluggish 
mind  or  narrowness  of  vision. 

Then  fell  the  darkness  of  night  upon  all  the 
lands  of  the  East.  The  current  of  time  seemed 
to  stop  at  once,  and  Asia  ceased  to  take  any  new 
food,  feeding  upon  its  own  past,  which  is  really 
feeding  upon  itself.  The  stillness  seemed  like 
death,  and  the  great  voice  was  silenced  which 
sent  forth  messages  of  eternal  truth  that  have 
saved  man's  life  from  pollution  for  generations, 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN  51 

like  the  ocean  of  air  that  keeps  the  earth  sweet, 
ever  cleansing  its  impurities. 

But  life  has  its  sleep,  its  periods  of  inactivity, 
when  it  loses  its  movements,  takes  no  new  food, 
living  upon  its  past  storage.  Then  it  grows  help- 
less, its  muscles  relaxed,  and  it  easily  lends  itself 
to  be  jeered  at  for  its  stupor.  In  the  rhythm  of 
life,  pauses  there  must  be  for  the  renewal  of  life. 
Life  in  its  activity  is  ever  spending  itself,  burning 
all  its  fuel.  This  extravagance  cannot  go  on 
indefinitely,  but  is  always  followed  by  a  passive 
stage,  when  all  expenditure  is  stopped  and  all 
adventures  abandoned  in  favour  of  rest  and  slow 
recuperation. 

The  tendency  of  mind  is  economical,  it  loves 
to  form  habits  and  move  in  grooves  which  save 
it  the  trouble  of  thinking  anew  at  each  of  its 
steps.  Ideals  once  formed  make  the  mind  lazy. 
It  becomes  afraid  to  risk  its  acquisitions  in  fresh 
endeavours.  It  tries  to  enjoy  complete  security 
by  shutting  up  its  belongings  behind  fortifications 
of  habits.  But  this  is  really  shutting  oneself  up 
from  the  fullest  enjoyment  of  one's  own  posses- 
sions. It  is  miserliness.  The  living  ideals  must 
not  lose  their  touch  with  the  growing  and 
changing  life.  Their  real  freedom  is  not  within 
the   boundaries   of  security,    but   in   the   high- 


52  NATIONALISM 

road   of   adventures,    full   of  the   risk    of    new 
experiences. 

One  morning  the  whole  world  looked  up  in 
surprise  when  Japan  broke  through  her  walls  of 
old  habits  in  a  night  and  came  out  triumphant. 
It  was  done  in  such  an  incredibly  short  time 
that  it  seemed  like  a  change  of  dress  and  not  like 
the  building  up  of  a  new  structure.  She  showed 
the  confident  strength  of  maturity,  and  the  fresh- 
ness and  infinite  potentiality  of  new  life  at  the 
same  moment.  The  fear  was  entertained  that 
it  was  a  mere  freak  of  history,  a  child's  game  of 
Time,  the  blowing  up  of  a  soap-bubble,  perfect 
in  its  rondure  and  colouring,  hollow  in  its  heart 
and  without  substance.  But  Japan  has  proved 
conclusively  that  this  sudden  revealment  of  her 
power  is  not  a  short-lived  wonder,  a  chance  pro- 
duct of  time  and  tide,  thrown  up  from  the  depth 
of  obscurity  to  be  swept  away  the  next  moment 
into  the  sea  of  oblivion. 

The  truth  is  that  Japan  is  old  and  new  at  the 
same  time.  She  has  her  legacy  of  ancient  culture 
from  the  East, — the  culture  that  enjoins  man  to 
look  for  his  true  wealth  and  power  in  his  inner 
soul,  the  culture  that  gives  self-possession  in  the 
face  of  loss  and  danger,  self-sacrifice  without 
counting  the  cost  or  hoping  for  gain,  defiance  of 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         53 

death,  acceptance  of  countless  social  obligations 
that  we  owe  to  men  as  social  beings.  In  a  word, 
modern  Japan  has  come  out  of  the  immemorial 
East  like  a  lotus  blossoming  in  easy  grace,  all  the 
while  keeping  its  firm  hold  upon  the  profound 
depth  from  which  it  has  sprung. 

And  Japan,  the  child  of  the  Ancient  East,  has 
also  fearlessly  claimed  all  the  gifts  of  the  modern 
age  for  herself.  She  has  shown  her  bold  spirit 
in  breaking  through  the  confinements  of  habits, 
useless  accumulations  of  the  lazy  mind,  which 
seeks  safety  in  its  thrift  and  its  locks  and  keys. 
Thus  she  has  come  in  contact  with  the  living 
time  and  has  accepted  with  eagerness  and  aptitude 
the  responsibilities  of  modern  civilization. 

This  it  is  which  has  given  heart  to  the  rest 
of  Asia.  We  have  seen  that  the  life  and  the 
strength  are  there  in  us,  only  the  dead  crust  has 
to  be  removed.  We  have  seen  that  taking 
shelter  in  the  dead  is  death  itself,  and  only  taking 
all  the  risk  of  life  to  the  fullest  extent  is  living. 

I,  for  myself,  canmot  believe  that  Japan  has 
become  what  she  is  by  imitating  the  West.  We 
cannot  imitate  life,  we  cannot  simulate  strength 
for  long,  nay,  what  is  more,  a  mere  imitation  is 
a  source  of  weakness.  For  it  hampers  our  true 
nature,  it  is  always  in  our  way.    It  is  like  dressing 


54  NATIONALISM 

our  skeleton  with  another  man's  skin,  giving  rise 
to  eternal  feuds  between  the  skin  and  the  bones 
at  every  movement. 

The  real  truth  is  that  science  is  not  man's 
nature,  it  is  mere  knowledge  and  training.  By 
knowing  the  laws  of  the  material  universe  you 
do  not  change  your  deeper  humanity.  You  can 
borrow  knowledge  from  others,  but  you  cannot 
borrow  temperament. 

But  at  the  imitative  stage  of  our  schooling  we 
cannot  distinguish  between  the  essential  and  the 
non-essential,  between  what  is  transferable  and 
what  is  not.  It  is  something  like  the  faith  of  the 
primitive  mind  in  the  magical  properties  of  the 
accidents  of  outward  forms  which  accompany  some 
real  truth.  We  are  afraid  of  leaving  out  some- 
thing valuable  and  efficacious  by  not  swallowing 
the  husk  with  the  kernel.  But  while  our  greed 
delights  in  wholesale  appropriation,  it  is  the 
function  of  our  vital  nature  to  assimilate,  which 
is  the  only  true  appropriation  for  a  living 
organism.  Where  there  is  life  it  is  sure  to 
assert  itself  by  its  choice  of  acceptance  and 
refusal  according  to  its  constitutional  necessity. 
The  living  organism  does  not  allow  itself  to 
grow  into  its  food,  it  changes  its  food  into  its 
own  body.     And  only  thus  can  it  grow  strong 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         55 

and  not  by  mere  accumulation,  or  by  giving  up 
its  personal  identity. 

Japan  has  imported  her  food  from  the  West, 
but  not  her  vital  nature.  Japan  cannot  altogether 
lose  and  merge  herself  in  the  scientific  parapher- 
nalia she  has  acquired  from  the  West  and  be 
turned  into  a  mere  borrowed  machine.  She  has 
her  own  soul,  which  must  assert  itself  over  all  her 
requirements.  That  she  is  capable  of  doing  so, 
and  that  the  process  of  assimilation  is  going  on, 
have  been  amply  proved  by  the  signs  of  vigorous 
health  that  she  exhibits.  And  I  earnestly  hope 
that  Japan  may  never  lose  her  faith  in  her  own 
soul,  in  the  mere  pride  of  her  foreign  acquisition. 
For  that  pride  itself  is  a  humiliation,  ultimately 
leading  to  poverty  and  weakness.  It  is  the  pride 
of  the  fop  who  sets  more  store  on  his  new  head- 
dress than  on  his  head  itself. 

The  whole  world  waits  to  see  what  this  great 
Eastern  nation  is  going  to  do  with  the  oppor- 
tunities and  responsibilities  she  has  accepted 
from  the  hands  of  the  modern  time.  If  it  be  a 
mere  reproduction  of  the  West,  then  the  great 
expectation  she  has  raised  will  remain  unfulfilled. 
For  there  are  grave  questions  that  the  Western 
civilization  has  presented  before  the  world  but 
not  completely  answered.     The  conflict  between 


56  NATIONALISM 

the  individual  and  the  state,  labour  and  capital, 
the  man  and  the  woman ;  the  conflict  between 
the  greed  of  material  gain  and  the  spiritual  life 
of  man,  the  organized  selfishness  of  nations  and 
the  higher  ideals  of  humanity ;  the  conflict 
between  all  the  ugly  complexities  inseparable 
from  giant  organizations  of  commerce  and  state 
and  the  natural  instincts  of  man  crying  for 
simplicity  and  beauty  and  fulness  of  leisure, — 
all  these  have  to  be  brought  to  a  harmony  in 
a  manner  not  yet  dreamt  of. 

We  have  seen  this  great  stream  of  civilization 
choking  itself  from  debris  carried  by  its  innumer- 
able channels.  We  have  seen  that  with  all  its 
vaunted  love  of  humanity  it  has  proved  itself 
the  greatest  menace  to  Man,  far  worse  than  the 
sudden  outbursts  of  nomadic  barbarism  from 
which  men  suffered  in  the  early  ages  of  history. 
We  have  seen  that,  in  spite  of  its  boasted  love 
of  freedom,  it  has  produced  worse  forms  of 
slavery  than  ever  were  current  in  earlier  societies, 
— slavery  whose  chains  are  unbreakable,  either 
because  they  are  unseen,  or  because  they  assume 
the  names  and  appearance  of  freedom.  We 
have  seen,  under  the  spell  of  its  gigantic  sordid- 
ness,  man  losing  faith  in  all  the  heroic  ideals  of 
life  which  have  made  him  great. 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         57 

Therefore  you  cannot  with  a  light  heart 
accept  the  modern  civilization  with  all  its 
tendencies,  methods  and  structures,  and  dream 
that  they  are  inevitable.  You  must  apply  your 
Eastern  mind,  your  spiritual  strength,  your  love 
of  simplicity,  your  recognition  of  social  obliga- 
tion, in  order  to  cut  out  a  new  path  for  this 
great  unwieldy  car  of  progress,  shrieking  out  its 
loud  discords  as  it  runs.  You  must  minimize 
the  immense  sacrifice  of  man's  life  and  freedom 
that  it  claims  in  its  every  movement.  For 
generations  you  have  felt  and  thought  and 
worked,  have  enjoyed  and  worshipped  in  your 
own  special  manner ;  and  this  cannot  be  cast 
off  like  old  clothes.  It  is  in  your  blood,  in  the 
marrow  of  your  bones,  in  the  texture  of  your 
flesh,  in  the  tissue  of  your  brains ;  and  it  must 
modify  everything  you  lay  your  hands  upon, 
without  your  knowing,  even  against  your  wishes. 
Once  you  did  solve  the  problems  of  man  to 
your  own  satisfaction,  you  had  your  philosophy 
of  life  and  evolved  your  own  art  of  living.  All 
this  you  must  apply  to  the  present  situation, 
and  out  of  it  will  arise  a  new  creation  and  not 
a  mere  repetition,  a  creation  which  the  soul  of 
your  people  will  own  for  itself  and  proudly  offer 
to  the  world  as  its  tribute  to  the  welfare  of  man. 


58  NATIONALISM 

Of  all  countries  in  Asia,  here  in  Japan  you  have 
the  freedom  to  use  the  materials  you  have 
gathered  from  the  West  according  to  your 
genius  and  your  need.  Therefore  your  respon- 
sibility is  all  the  greater,  for  in  your  voice  Asia 
shall  answer  the  questions  that  Europe  has  sub- 
mitted to  the  conference  of  Man.  In  your  land 
the  experiments  will  be  carried  on  by  which 
the  East  will  change  the  aspects  of  modern 
civilization,  infusing  life  in  it  where  it  is  a. 
machine,  substituting  the  human  heart  for  cold 
expediency,  not  caring  so  much  for  power  and 
success  as  for  harmonious  and  living  growth,  for 
truth  and  beauty. 

I  cannot  but  bring  to  your  mind  those  days 
when  the  whole  of  Eastern  Asia  from  Burma  to 
Japan  was  united  with  India  in  the  closest  tie 
of  friendship,  the  only  natural  tie  which  can 
exist  between  nations.  There  was  a  livincj  com- 
munication  of  hearts,  a  nervous  system  evolved 
through  which  messages  ran  between  us  about 
the  deepest  needs  of  humanity.  We  did  not 
stand  in  fear  of  each  other,  we  had  not  to  arm 
ourselves  to  keep  each  other  in  check ;  our 
relation  was  not  that  of  self-interest,  of  explora- 
tion and  spoliation  of  each  other's  pockets  ;  ideas 
and  ideals  were  exchanged,  gifts  of  the  highest 


/ 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         59 

love  were  offered  and  taken ;  no  difference  of 
languages  and  customs  hindered  us  in  approach- 
ing each  other  heart  to  heart ;  no  pride  of  race 
or  insolent  consciousness  of  superiority,  physical 
or  mental,  marred  our  relation ;  our  arts  and 
literatures  put  forth  new  leaves  and  flowers 
under  the  influence  of  this  sunlight  of  united 
hearts ;  and  races  belonging  to  different  lands 
and  languages  and  histories  acknowledged  the 
highest  unity  of  man  and  the  deepest  bond  of 
love.  May  we  not  also  remember  that  in  those 
days  of  peace  and  goodwill,  of  men  uniting  for 
those  supreme  ends  of  life,  your  nature  laid  by 
for  itself  the  balm  of  immortality  which  has 
helped  your  people  to  be  born  again  in  a  new 
age,  to  be  able  to  survive  its  old  outworn 
structures  and  take  on  a  new  young  body,  to 
come  out  unscathed  from  the  shock  of  the 
most  wonderful  revolution  that  the  world  has 
ever  seen  ? 

The  political  civilization  which  has  sprung  up 
from  the  soil  of  Europe  and  is  overrunning  the 
whole  world,  like  some  prolific  weed,  is  based 
upon  exclusiveness.  It  is  always  watchful  to 
keep  the  aliens  at  bay  or  to  exterminate  them. 
It  is  carnivorous  and  cannibalistic  in  its  tenden- 
cies, it  feeds  upon  the  resources  of  other  peoples 


60  NATIONALISM 

and  tries  to  swallow  their  whole  future.  It  is 
always  afraid  of  other  races  achieving  eminence, 
naming  it  as  a  peril,  and  tries  to  thwart  all 
symptoms  of  greatness  outside  its  own  bound- 
aries, forcing  down  races  of  men  who  are 
weaker,  to  be  eternally  fixed  in  their  weakness. 
Before  this  political  civilization  came  to  its 
power  and  opened  its  hungry  jaws  wide  enough 
to  gulp  down  great  continents  of  the  earth,  we 
had  wars,  pillages,  changes  of  monarchy  and 
consequent  miseries,  but  never  such  a  sight  of 
fearful  and  hopeless  voracity,  such  wholesale 
feeding  of  nation  upon  nation,  such  huge 
machines  for  turning  great  portions  of  the 
earth  into  mince-meat,  never  such  terrible 
jealousies  with  all  their  ugly  teeth  and  claws 
ready  for  tearing  open  each  other's  vitals.  This 
political  civilization  is  scientific,  not  human.  It 
is  powerful  because  it  concentrates  all  its  forces 
upon  one  purpose,  like  a  millionaire  acquiring 
money  at  the  cost  of  his  soul.  It  betrays 
its  trust,  it  weaves  its  meshes  of  lies  without 
shame,  it  enshrines  gigantic  idols  of  greed  in  its 
temples,  taking  great  pride  in  the  costly  cere- 
monials of  its  worship,  calling  this  patriotism. 
And  it  can  be  safely  prophesied  that  this  cannot 
go   on,  for  there  is  a  moral  law  in  this  world 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         61 

which  has  its  application  both  to  individuals  and 
to  organized  bodies  of  men.  You  cannot  go 
on  violating  these  laws  in  the  name  of  your 
nation,  yet  enjoy  their  advantage  as  individuals. 
This  public  sapping  of  ethical  ideals  slowly 
reacts  upon  each  member  of  society,  gradually 
breeding  weakness,  where  it  is  not  seen,  and 
causing  that  cynical  distrust  of  all  things  sacred 
in  human  nature,  which  is  the  true  symptom  of 
senility.  You  must  keep  in  mind  that  this 
political  civilization,  this  creed  of  national 
patriotism,  has  not  been  given  a  long  trial. 
The  lamp  of  ancient  Greece  is  extinct  in  the 
land  where  it  was  first  lighted,  the  power  of 
Rome  lies  dead  and  buried  under  the  ruins  of 
its  vast  empire.  But  the  civilization,  whose 
basis  is  society  and  the  spiritual  ideal  of  man, 
is  still  a  living  thing  in  China  and  in  India. 
Though  it  may  look  feeble  and  small,  judged 
by  the  standard  of  the  mechanical  power  of 
modern  days,  yet  like  small  seeds  it  still  contains 
life  and  will  sprout  and  grow,  and  spread  its 
beneficent  branches,  producing  flowers  and  fruits 
when  its  time  comes  and  showers  of  grace 
descend  upon  it  from  heaven.  But  ruins  of 
sky-scrapers  of  power  and  broken  machinery 
of  greed,  even  God's  rain  is  powerless  to  raise 


62  NATIONALISM 

up  again  ;  for  they  were  not  of  life,  but  went 
against  life  as  a  whole, — they  are  relies  of  the 
rebellion  that  shattered  itself  to  pieces  against 
the  eternal. 

But  the  charge  is  brought  against  us  that  the 
ideals  we  cherish  in  the  East  are  static,  that  they 
have  not  the  impetus  in  them  to  move,  to  open 
out  new  vistas  of  knowledge  and  power,  that 
the  systems  of  philosophy  which  are  the  main- 
stays of  the  time-worn  civilizations  of  the  East 
despise  all  outward  proofs,  remaining  stolidly 
satisfied  in  their  subjective  certainty.  This 
proves  that  when  our  knowledge  is  vague  we 
are  apt  to  accuse  of  vagueness  our  object  of 
knowledge  itself.  To  a  Western  observer  our 
civilization  appears  as  all  metaphysics,  as  to  a 
deaf  man  piano-playing  appears  to  be  mere  move- 
ments of  fingers  and  no  music.  He  cannot  think 
that  we  have  found  some  deep  basis  of  reality 
upon  which  we  have  built  our  institutions. 

Unfortunately  all  proofs  of  reality  are  in 
realization.  The  reality  of  the  scene  before  you 
depends  only  upon  the  fact  that  you  can  see,  and 
it  is  difficult  for  us  to  prove  to  an  unbeliever 
that  our  civilization  is  not  a  nebulous  system  of 
abstract  speculations,  that  it  has  achieved  some- 
thing which  is  a  positive  truth, — a  truth  that  can 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN  63 

give  man's  heart  its  shelter  and  sustenance.  It 
has  evolved  an  inner  sense, — a  sense  of  vision, 
the  vision  of  the  infinite  reality  in  all  finite 
things. 

But  he  says,  "  You  do  not  make  any  progress, 
there  is  no  movement  in  you."  I  ask  him,  "  How 
do  you  know  it  ?  You  have  to  judge  progress 
according  to  its  aim.  A  railway  train  makes  its 
progress  towards  the  terminus  station, — it  is 
movement.  But  a  full-grown  tree  has  no  definite 
movement  of  that  kind,  its  progress  is  the  in- 
ward progress  of  life.  It  lives,  with  its  aspira- 
tion towards  light  tingling  in  its  leaves  and 
creeping  in  its  silent  sap." 

We  also  have  lived  for  centuries,  we  still  live, 
and  we  have  our  aspiration  for  a  reality  that  has 
no  end  to  its  realization, — a  reality  that  goes 
beyond  death,  giving  it  a  meaning,  that  rises 
above  all  evils  of  life,  bringing  its  peace  and 
purity,  its  cheerful  renunciation  of  self.  The  pro- 
duct of  this  inner  life  is  a  living  product.  It  will 
be  needed  when  the  youth  returns  home  weary 
and  dust -laden,  when  the  soldier  is  wounded, 
when  the  wealth  is  squandered  away  and  pride 
is  humbled,  when  man's  heart  cries  for  truth  in 
the  immensity  of  facts  and  harmony  in  the  con- 
tradiction of  tendencies.     Its  value  is  not  in  its 


64  NATIONALISM 

multiplication  of  materials,  but  in  its  spiritual 
fulfilment. 

There  are  things  that  cannot  wait.  You  have 
to  rush  and  run  and  march  if  you  must  fight  or 
take  the  best  place  in  the  market.  You  strain 
your  nerves  and  are  on  the  alert  when  you  chase 
opportunities  that  are  always  on  the  wing.  But 
there  are  ideals  which  do  not  play  hide-and-seek 
with  our  life ;  they  slowly  grow  from  seed  to 
flower,  from  flower  to  fruit ;  they  require  in- 
finite space  and  heaven's  light  to  mature,  and  the 
fruits  that  they  produce  can  survive  years  of  in- 
sult and  neglect.  The  East  with  her  ideals,  in 
whose  bosom  are  stored  the  ages  of  sunlight  and 
silence  of  stars,  can  patiently  wait  till  the  West, 
hurrying  after  the  expedient,  loses  breath  and 
stops.  Europe,  while  busily  speeding  to  her  en- 
gagements, disdainfully  casts  her  glance  from  her 
carriage  window  at  the  reaper  reaping  his  harvest 
in  the  field,  and  in  her  intoxication  of  speed 
cannot  but  think  him  as  slow  and  ever  receding 
backwards.  But  the  speed  comes  to  its  end,  the 
engagement  loses  its  meaning  and  the  hungry 
heart  clamours  for  food,  till  at  last  she  comes  to 
the  lowly  reaper  reaping  his  harvest  in  the  sun. 
For  if  the  office  cannot  wait,  or  the  buying  and 
selling,  or  the  craving  for  excitement,  love  waits 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         65 

and  beauty  and  the  wisdom  of  suffering  and  the 
fruits  of  patient  devotion  and  reverent  meekness 
of  simple  faith.  And  thus  shall  wait  the  East 
till  her  time  comes. 

I  must  not  hesitate  to  acknowledge  where 
Europe  is  great,  for  great  she  is  without  doubt. 
We  cannot  help  loving  her  with  all  our  heart, 
and  paying  her  the  best  homage  of  our  admira- 
tion,— the  Europe  who,  in  her  literature  and  art, 
pours  out  an  inexhaustible  cascade  of  beauty 
and  truth  fertilizing  all  countries  and  all  time ; 
the  Europe  who,  with  a  mind  which  is  titanic  in 
its  untiring  power,  is  sweeping  the  height  and 
the  depth  of  the  universe,  winning  her  homage 
of  knowledge  from  the  infinitely  great  and  the 
infinitely  small,  applying  all  the  resources  of  her 
great  intellect  and  heart  in  healing  the  sick  and 
alleviating  those  miseries  of  man  which  up  till 
now  we  were  contented  to  accept  in  a  spirit  of 
hopeless  resignation ;  the  Europe  who  is  making 
the  earth  yield  more  fruit  than  seemed  possible, 
coaxing  and  compelling  the  great  forces  of  nature 
into  man's  service.  Such  true  greatness  must 
have  its  motive  power  in  spiritual  strength.  For 
only  the  spirit  of  man  can  defy  all  limitations, 
have  faith  in  its  ultimate  success,  throw  its 
search  -  light   beyond   the    immediate    and    the 


66  NATIONALISM 

apparent,  gladly  suffer  martyrdom  for  ends  which 
cannot  be  achieved  in  its  lifetime  and  accept 
failure  without  acknowledging  defeat.  In  the 
heart  of  Europe  runs  the  purest  stream  of  human 
love,  of  love  of  justice,  of  spirit  of  self-sacrifice 
for  higher  ideals.  The  Christian  culture  of  cen- 
turies has  sunk  deep  in  her  life's  core.  In  Europe 
we  have  seen  noble  minds  who  have  ever  stood 
up  for  the  rights  of  man  irrespective  of  colour 
and  creed  ;  who  have  braved  calumny  and  insult 
from  their  own  people  in  fighting  for  humanity's 
cause  and  raising  their  voices  against  the  mad 
orgies  of  militarism,  against  the  rage  for  brutal 
retaliation  or  rapacity  that  sometimes  takes 
possession  of  a  whole  people;  who  are  always 
ready  to  make  reparation  for  wrongs  done  in  the 
past  by  their  own  nations  and  vainly  attempt  to 
stem  the  tide  of  cowardly  injustice  that  flows 
unchecked  because  the  resistance  is  weak  and 
innocuous  on  the  part  of  the  injured.  There  are 
these  knight-errants  of  modern  Europe  who  have 
not  lost  their  faith  in  the  disinterested  love  of 
freedom,  in  the  ideals  which  own  no  geographical 
boundaries  or  national  self-seeking.  These  are 
there  to  prove  that  the  fountainhead  of  the  water 
of  everlasting  life  has  not  run  dry  in  Europe,  and 
from  thence  she  will  have  her  rebirth  time  after 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         67 

time.  Only  there,  where  Europe  is  too  con- 
sciously busy  in  building  up  her  power,  defying 
her  deeper  nature  and  mocking  it,  she  is  heaping 
up  her  iniquities  to  the  sky,  crying  for  God's 
vengeance  and  spreading  the  infection  of  ugli- 
ness, physical  and  moral,  over  the  face  of  the 
earth  with  her  heartless  commerce  heedlessly 
outraging  man's  sense  of  the  beautiful  and  the 
good.  Europe  is  supremely  good  in  her  benefi- 
cence where  her  face  is  turned  to  all  humanity ; 
and  Europe  is  supremely  evil  in  her  maleficent 
aspect  where  her  face  is  turned  only  upon  her 
own  interest,  using  all  her  power  of  greatness 
for  ends  which  are  against  the  infinite  and  the 
eternal  in  Man. 

Eastern  Asia  has  been  pursuing  its  own  path, 
evolving  its  own  civilization,  which  was  not 
political  but  social,  not  predatory  and  mechanic- 
ally efficient  but  spiritual  and  based  upon  all 
the  varied  and  deeper  relations  of  humanity. 
The  solutions  of  the  life  problems  of  peoples 
were  thought  out  in  seclusion  and  carried  out 
behind  the  security  of  aloofness,  where  all  the 
dynastic  changes  and  foreign  invasions  hardly 
touched  them.  But  now  we  are  overtaken  by 
the  outside  world,  our  seclusion  is  lost  for  ever. 
Yet  this  we  must  not  regret,  as  a  plant  should 


68  NATIONALISM 

never  regret  when  the  obscurity  of  its  seed-time 
is  broken.  Now  the  time  has  come  when  we 
must  make  the  world  problem  our  own  problem  ; 
we  must  bring  the  spirit  of  our  civilization  into 
harmony  with  the  history  of  all  nations  of  the 
earth ;  we  must  not,  in  foolish  pride,  still  keep 
ourselves  fast  within  the  shell  of  the  seed  and 
the  crust  of  the  earth  which  protected  and 
nourished  our  ideals ;  for  these,  the  shell  and 
the  crust,  were  meant  to  be  broken,  so  that  life 
may  spring  up  in  all  its  vigour  and  beauty, 
bringing  its  offerings  to  the  world  in  open  light. 
In  this  task  of  breaking  the  barrier  and 
facing  the  world  Japan  has  come  out  the  first 
in  the  East.  She  has  infused  hope  in  the  heart 
of  all  Asia.  This  hope  provides  the  hidden  fire 
which  is  needed  for  all  works  of  creation.  Asia 
now  feels  that  she  must  prove  her  life  by  pro- 
ducing living  work,  she  must  not  lie  passively 
dormant,  or  feebly  imitate  the  West,  in  the 
infatuation  of  fear  or  flattery.  For  this  we 
offer  our  thanks  to  this  Land  of  the  Rising 
Sun  and  solemnly  ask  her  to  remember  that 
she  has  the  mission  of  the  East  to  fulfil.  She 
must  infuse  the  sap  of  a  fuller  humanity  into 
the  heart  of  modern  civilization.  She  must 
never  allow  it  to  get  choked  with  the  noxious 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         69 

undergrowth,  but  lead  it  up  towards  light  and 
freedom,  towards  the  pure  air  and  broad  space, 
where  it  can  receive,  in  the  dawn  of  its  day  and 
the  darkness  of  its  night,  heaven's  inspiration. 
Let  the  greatness  of  her  ideals  become  visible 
to  all  men  like  her  snow-crowned  Fuji  rising 
from  the  heart  of  the  country  into  the  region 
of  the  infinite,  supremely  distinct  from  its 
surroundings,  beautiful  like  a  maiden  in  its 
magnificent  sweep  of  curve,  yet  firm  and  strong 
and  serenely  majestic. 


II 

I  have  travelled  in  many  countries  and  have 
met  with  men  of  all  classes,  but  never  in  my 
travels  did  I  feel  the  presence  of  the  human  so 
distinctly  as  in  this  land.  In  other  great 
countries  signs  of  man's  power  loomed  large, 
and  I  saw  vast  organizations  which  showed 
efficiency  in  all  their  features.  There,  display 
and  extravagance,  in  dress,  in  furniture,  in 
costly  entertainments,  are  startling.  They  seem 
to  push  you  back  into  a  corner,  like  a  poor 
intruder  at  a  feast ;  they  are  apt  to  make  you 
envious,  or  take  your  breath  away  with  amaze- 
ment.    There,  you  do  not  feel  man  as  supreme ; 


70  NATIONALISM 

you  are  hurled  against  a  stupendousness  of 
things  that  alienates.  But  in  Japan  it  is  not 
the  display  of  power,  or  wealth,  that  is  the 
predominating  element.  You  see  everywhere 
emblems  of  love  and  admiration,  and  not  mostly 
of  ambition  and  greed.  You  see  a  people  whose 
heart  has  come  out  and  scattered  itself  in  pro- 
fusion in  its  commonest  utensils  of  everyday 
life,  in  its  social  institutions,  in  its  manners, 
which  are  carefully  perfect,  and  in  its  dealings 
with  things  which  are  not  only  deft  but  grace- 
ful in  every  movement. 

What  has  impressed  me  most  in  this  country 
is  the  conviction  that  you  have  realized  nature's 
secrets,  not  by  methods  of  analytical  knowledge, 
but  by  sympathy.  You  have  known  her  language 
of  lines,  and  music  of  colours,  the  symmetry  in 
her  irregularities,  and  the  cadence  in  her  freedom 
of  movements  ;  you  have  seen  how  she  leads  her 
immense  crowds  of  things  yet  avoids  all  frictions ; 
how  the  very  conflicts  in  her  creations  break  out 
in  dance  and  music ;  how  her  exuberance  has 
the  aspect  of  the  fulness  of  self-abandonment, 
and  not  a  mere  dissipation  of  display.  You 
have  discovered  that  nature  reserves  her  power 
in  forms  of  beauty ;  and  it  is  this  beauty  which, 
like  a  mother,  nourishes  all  the  giant  forces  at 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         71 

her  breast,  keeping  them  in  active  vigour,  yet 
in  repose.  You  have  known  that  energies  of 
nature  save  themselves  from  wearing  out  by  the 
rhythm  of  a  perfect  grace,  and  that  she  with 
the  tenderness  of  her  curved  lines  takes  away 
fatigue  from  the  world's  muscles.  I  have  felt 
that  you  have  been  able  to  assimilate  these 
secrets  into  your  life,  and  the  truth  which  lies 
in  the  beauty  of  all  things  has  passed  into  your 
souls.  A  mere  knowledge  of  things  can  be  had 
in  a  short  enough  time,  but  their  spirit  can  only 
be  acquired  by  centuries  of  training  and  self- 
control.  Dominating  nature  from  outside  is  a 
much  simpler  thing  than  making  ha'  your  own 
in  love's  delight,  which  is  a  work  of  true  genius. 
Your  race  has  shown  that  genius,  not  by  acquire- 
ment, but  by  creation  ;  not  by  display  of  things, 
but  by  manifestation  of  its  own  inner  being. 
This  creative  power  there  is  in  all  nations,  and 
it  is  ever  active  in  getting  hold  of  men's  natures 
and  giving  them  a  form  according  to  its  ideals. 
But  here,  in  Japan,  it  seems  to  have  achieved 
its  success,  and  deeply  sunk  into  the  minds  of 
all  men,  and  permeated  their  muscles  and  nerves. 
Your  instincts  have  become  true,  your  senses 
keen,  and  your  hands  have  acquired  natural 
skill.      The   genius   of   Europe   has    given   her 


72  NATIONALISM 

people  the  power  of  organization,  which  has 
specially  made  itself  manifest  in  polities  and 
commerce  and  in  co-ordinating  scientific  know- 
ledge. The  genius  of  Japan  has  given  you  the 
vision  of  beauty  in  nature  and  the  power  of 
realizing  it  in  your  life. 

All  particular  civilization  is  the  interpretation 
of  particular  human  experience.  Europe  seems 
to  have  felt  emphatically  the  conflict  of  things  in 
the  universe,  which  can  only  be  brought  under 
control  by  conquest.  Therefore  she  is  ever  ready 
for  fight,  and  the  best  portion  of  her  attention  is 
occupied  in  organizing  forces.  But  Japan  has 
felt,  in  her  world,  the  touch  of  some  presence, 
which  has  evoked  in  her  soul  a  feeling  of  reverent 
adoration.  She  does  not  boast  of  her  mastery  of 
nature,  but  to  her  she  brings,  with  infinite  care 
and  joy,  her  offerings  of  love.  Her  relationship 
with  the  world  is  the  deeper  relationship  of  heart. 
This  spiritual  bond  of  love  she  has  established 
with  the  hills  of  her  country,  with  the  sea  and 
the  streams,  with  the  forests  in  all  their  flowery 
moods  and  varied  physiognomy  of  branches  ;  she 
has  taken  into  her  heart  all  the  rustling  whispers 
and  sighing  of  the  woodlands  and  sobbing  of  the 
waves  ;  the  sun  and  the  moon  she  has  studied  in 
all  the  modulations  of  their  lights  and  shades. 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         73 

and  she  is  glad  to  close  her  shops  to  greet  the 
seasons  in  her  orchards  and  gardens  and  corn- 
fields. This  opening  of  the  heart  to  the  soul  of 
the  world  is  not  confined  to  a  section  of  your 
privileged  classes,  it  is  not  the  forced  product  of 
exotic  culture,  but  it  belongs  to  all  your  men 
and  women  of  all  conditions.  This  experience  of 
your  soul,  in  meeting  a  personality  in  the  heart 
of  the  world,  has  been  embodied  in  your  civiliza- 
tion. It  is  a  civilization  of  human  relationship. 
Your  duty  towards  your  state  has  naturally 
assumed  the  character  of  filial  duty,  your  nation 
becoming  one  family  with  your  Emperor  as  its 
head.  Your  national  unity  has  not  been  evolved 
from  the  comradeship  of  arms  for  defensive  and 
offensive  purpose,  or  from  partnership  in  raiding 
adventures,  dividing  among  each  member  the 
danger  and  spoils  of  robbery.  It  is  not  an  out- 
come of  the  necessity  of  organization  for  some 
ulterior  purpose,  but  it  is  an  extension  of  the 
family  and  the  obligations  of  the  heart  in  a  wide 
field  of  space  and  time.  The  ideal  of  "  maitri "  is 
at  the  bottom  of  your  culture, — "maitri"  with 
men  and  "  maitri "  with  Nature.  Ana  the  true 
expression  of  this  love  is  in  the  language  of 
beauty,  which  is  so  abundantly  universal  in  this 
land.     This  is   the  reason  why  a  stranger,  like 


74  NATIONALISM 

myself,  instead  of  feeling  envy  or  humiliation 
before  these  manifestations  of  beauty,  these 
creations  of  love,  feels  a  readiness  to  participate 
in  the  joy  and  glory  of  such  revealment  of  the 
human  heart. 

And  this  has  made  me  all  the  more  appre- 
hensive of  the  change  which  threatens  Japanese 
civilization,  as  something  like  a  menace  to  one's 
own  person.  For  the  huge  heterogeneity  of  the 
modern  age,  whose  only  common  bond  is  useful- 
ness, is  nowhere  so  pitifully  exposed  against  the 
dignity  and  hidden  power  of  reticent  beauty  as 
in  Japan. 

But  the  danger  lies  in  this,  that  organized 
ugliness  storms  the  mind  and  carries  the  day  by 
its  mass,  by  its  aggressive  persistence,  by  its 
power  of  mockery  directed  against  the  deeper 
sentiments  of  heart.  Its  harsh  obtrusiveness 
makes  it  forcibly  visible  to  us,  overcoming  our 
senses, — and  we  bring  sacrifices  to  its  altar,  as 
does  a  savage  to  the  fetich  which  appears  power- 
ful because  of  its  hideousness.  Therefore  its 
rivalry  with  things  that  are  modest  and  profound 
and  have  the  subtle  delicacy  of  life  is  to  be 
dreaded. 

I  am  quite  sure  that  there  are  men  in  your 
country  who  are  not   in  sympathy  with   yoiu- 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN  75 

inherited  ideals ;  whose'object  is  to  gain,  and  not 
to  grow.  Tliey  are  loud  in  their  boast  that  they 
have  modernized  Japan.  While  I  agree  with 
them  so  far  as  to  say  that  the  spirit  of  the  race 
should  harmonize  with  the  spirit  of  the  time,  I 
must  warn  them  that  modernizing  is  a  mere 
affectation  of  modernism,  just  as  affectation  of 
poesy  is  poetizing.  It  is  nothing  but  mimicry, 
only  affectation  is  louder  than  the  original,  and 
it  is  too  literal.  One  must  bear  in  mind  that 
those  who  have  the  true  modern  spirit  need  not 
modernize,  just  as  those  who  are  truly  brave  are 
not  braggarts.  Modernism  is  not  in  the  dress  of 
the  Europeans ;  or  in  the  hideous  structures, 
where  their  children  are  interned  when  they  take 
their  lessons  ;  or  in  the  square  houses  with  flat, 
straight  wall-surfaces,  pierced  with  parallel  lines 
of  windows,  where  these  people  are  caged  in 
their  lifetime  ;  certainly  modernism  is  not  in  their 
ladies'  bonnets,  carrying  on  them  loads  of  incon- 
gruities. These  are  not  modern,  but  merely 
European.  True  modernism  is  freedom  of  mind, 
not  slavery  of  taste.  It  is  independence  of 
thought  and  action,  not  tutelage  under  European 
schoolmasters.  It  is  science,  but  not  its  wrong 
application  in  life, — a  mere  imitation  of  our 
science  teachers  who  reduce  it  into  a  supersti- 


76  NATIONALISM 

tion,  absurdly  invoking  its  aid  for  all  impossible 
purposes. 

Life  based  upon  mere  science  is  attractive  to 
some  men,  because  it  has  all  the  characteristics 
of  sport ;  it  feigns  seriousness,  but  is  not  pro- 
found. When  you  go  a-hunting,  the  less  pity 
you  have  the  better ;  for  your  one  object  is  to 
chase  the  game  and  kill  it,  to  feel  that  you  are 
the  greater  animal,  that  your  method  of  destruc- 
tion is  thorough  and  scientific.  And  the  life  of 
science  is  that  superficial  life.  It  pursues  success 
with  skill  and  thoroughness,  and  takes  no  account 
of  the  higher  nature  of  man.  But  those  whose 
minds  are  crude  enough  to  plan  their  lives  upon 
the  supposition  that  man  is  merely  a  hunter  and 
his  paradise  the  paradise  of  sportsmen  will  be 
rudely  awakened  in  the  midst  of  their  trophies 
of  skeletons  and  skulls. 

I  do  not  for  a  moment  suggest  that  Japan 
should  be  unmindful  of  acquiring  modern 
weapons  of  self- protection.  But  this  should 
never  be  allowed  to  go  beyond  her  instinct  of 
self-preservation.  She  must  know  that  the  real 
power  is  not  in  the  weapons  themselves,  but  in 
the  man  who  wields  those  weapons ;  and  when 
he,  in  his  eagerness  for  power,  multiplies  his 
weapons  at  the  cost   of  his  own  soul,  then   it 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         77 

is  he  who  is  in  even  greater  danger  than  his 
enemies. 

Things  that  are  living  are  so  easily  hurt ; 
therefore  they  require  protection.  In  nature, 
life  protects  itself  within  its  coverings,  which  are 
built  with  life's  own  material.  Therefore  they 
are  in  harmony  with  life's  growth,  or  else  when 
the  time  comes  they  easily  give  way  and  are  for- 
gotten. The  living  man  has  his  true  protection 
in  his  spiritual  ideals,  which  have  their  vital  con- 
nection with  his  life  and  grow  with  his  growth. 
But,  unfortunately,  all  his  armour  is  not  living, — 
some  of  it  is  made  of  steel,  inert  and  mechanical. 
Therefore,  while  making  use  of  it,  man  has  to  be 
careful  to  protect  himself  from  its  tyranny.  If 
he  is  weak  enough  to  grow  smaller  to  fit  himself 
to  his  covering,  then  it  becomes  a  process  of 
gradual  suicide  by  shrinkage  of  the  soul.  And 
Japan  must  have  a  firm  faith  in  the  moral  law 
of  existence  to  be  able  to  assert  to  herself  that 
the  Western  nations  are  following  that  path 
of  suicide,  where  they  are  smothering  their 
humanity  under  the  immense  weight  of  organiza- 
tions in  order  to  keep  themselves  in  power  and 
hold  others  in  subjection. 

What  is  dangerous  for  Japan  is,  not  the 
imitation  of  the  outer  features  of  the  West,  but 


78  NATIONALISM 

the  acceptance  of  the  motive  force  of  the 
Western  nationalism  as  her  own.  Her  social 
ideals  are  already  showing  signs  of  defeat  at  the 
hands  of  politics.  I  can  see  her  motto,  taken 
from  science,  "  Survival  of  the  Fittest,"  writ 
large  at  the  entrance  of  her  present-day  history 
— ^the  motto  whose  meaning  is,  "  Help  yourself, 
and  never  heed  what  it  costs  to  others " ;  the 
motto  of  the  blind  man  who  only  believes  in 
what  he  can  touch,  because  he  cannot  see.  But 
those  who  can  see  know  that  men  are  so  closely 
knit  that  when  you  strike  others  the  blow 
comes  back  to  yourself.  The  moral  law,  which 
is  the  greatest  discovery  of  man,  is  the  discovery 
of  this  wonderful  truth,  that  man  becomes  all 
the  truer  the  more  he  realizes  himself  in  others. 
This  truth  has  not  only  a  subjective  value,  but 
is  manifested  in  every  department  of  our  life. 
And  nations  who  sedulously  cultivate  moral 
blindness  as  the  cult  of  patriotism  will  end  their 
existence  in  a  sudden  and  violent  death.  In 
past  ages  we  had  foreign  invasions,  but  they 
never  touched  the  soul  of  the  people  deeply. 
They  were  merely  the  outcome  of  individual 
ambitions.  The  people  themselves,  being  free 
from  the  responsibilities  of  the  baser  and  more 
heinous  side   of  those  adventures,   had  all  the 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         79 

advantage  of  the  heroic  and  the  human 
disciplines  derived  from  them.  This  developed 
their  unflinching  loyalty,  their  single-minded 
devotion  to  the  obligations  of  honour,  their 
power  of  complete  self- surrender  and  fearless 
acceptance  of  death  and  danger.  Therefore  the 
ideals,  whose  seats  were  in  the '  hearts  of  the 
people,  would  not  undergo  any  serious  change 
owing  to  the  policies  adopted  by  the  kings  or 
generals.  But  now,  where  the  spirit  of  the 
Western  nationalism  prevails,  the  whole  people 
is  being  taught  from  boyhood  to  foster  hatreds 
and  ambitions  by  all  kinds  of  means — by  the 
manufacture  of  half-truths  and  untruths  in 
history,  by  persistent  misrepresentation  of  other 
races  and  the  culture  of  unfavourable  sentiments 
towards  them,  by  setting  up  memorials  of 
events,  very  often  false,  which  for  the  sake  of 
humanity  should  be  speedily  forgotten,  thus 
continually  brewing  evil  menace  towards  neigh- 
bours and  nations  other  than  their  own.  This 
is  poisoning  the  very  fountainhead  of  humanity. 
It  is  discrediting  the  ideals,  which  were  born  of 
the  lives  of  men  who  were  our  greatest  and 
best.  It  is  holding  up  gigantic  selfishness  as 
the  one  universal  religion  for  all  nations  of  the 
world.      We  can  take  anything  else  from  the 


80  NATIONALISM 

hands  of  science,  but  not  this  elixir  of  moral 
death.  Never  think  for  a  moment  that  the 
hurts  you  inflict  upon  other  races  will  not  infect 
you,  or  that  the  enmities  you  sow  around  your 
homes  will  be  a  wall  of  protection  to  you  for 
all  time  to  come.  To  imbue  the  minds  of  a 
whole  people  with  an  abnormal  vanity  of  its 
own  superiority,  to  teach  it  to  take  pride  in  its 
moral  callousness  and  ill- begotten  wealth,  to 
perpetuate  humiliation  of  defeated  nations  by 
exhibiting  trophies  won  from  war,  and  using 
these  in  schools  in  order  to  breed  in  children's 
minds  contempt  for  others,  is  imitating  the  West 
where  she  has  a  festering  sore,  whose  swelling 
is  a  swelling  of  disease  eating  into  its  vitality. 

Our  food  crops,  which  are  necessary  for  our 
sustenance,  are  products  of  centuries  of  selection 
and  care.  But  the  vegetation,  which  we  have 
not  to  transform  into  our  lives,  does  not  require 
the  patient  thoughts  of  generations.  It  is  not 
easy  to  get  rid  of  weeds  ;  but  it  is  easy,  by 
process  of  neglect,  to  ruin  your  food  crops  and 
let  them  revert  to  their  primitive  state  of  wild- 
ness.  Likewise  the  culture,  which  has  so  kindly 
adapted  itself  to  your  soil — so  intimate  with  life, 
so  human — not  only  needed  tilling  and  weeding 
in  past  ages,  but  still  needs  anxious  work  and 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         81 

watching.  What  is  merely  modern — as  science 
and  methods  of  organization  —  can  be  trans- 
planted ;  but  what  is  vitally  human  has  fibres 
so  delicate,  and  roots  so  numerous  and  far- 
reaching,  that  it  dies  when  moved  from  its  soil. 
Therefore  I  am  afraid  of  the  rude  pressure  of 
the  political  ideals  of  the  West  upon  your  own. 
In  political  civilization,  the  state  is  an  abstraction 
and  relationship  of  men  utilitarian.  Because  it 
has  no  root  in  sentiments,  it  is  so  dangerously 
easy  to  handle.  Haifa  century  has  been  enough 
for  you  to  master  this  machine ;  and  there  are 
men  among  you  whose  fondness  for  it  exceeds 
their  love  for  the  living  ideals,  which  were  born 
with  the  birth  of  your  nation  and  nursed  in 
your  centuries.  It  is  like  a  child  who,  in  the 
excitement  of  his  play,  imagines  he  likes  his 
playthings  better  than  his  mother. 

Where  man  is  at  his  greatest,  he  is  un- 
conscious. Your  civilization,  whose  mainspring 
is  the  bond  of  human  relationship,  has  been 
nourished  in  the  depth  of  a  healthy  life  beyond 
reach  of  prying  self- analysis.  But  a  mere 
political  relationship  is  all-conscious ;  it  is  an 
eruptive  inflammation  of  aggressiveness.  It  has 
forcibly  burst  upon  your  notice.  And  the  time 
has  come  when  you  have  to  be  roused  into  full 

G 


82  NATIONALISM 

consciousness  of  the  truth  by  which  you  live,  so 
that  you  nnay  not  be  taken  unawares.  The  past 
has  been  God's  gift  to  you  ;  about  the  present, 
you  must  make  your  own  choice. 

So  the  questions  you  have  to  put  to  your- 
selves are  these — "  Have  we  read  the  world 
wrong,  and  based  our  relation  to  it  upon  an 
ignorance  of  human  nature  ?  Is  the  instinct  of 
the  West  right,  where  she  builds  her  national 
welfare  behind  the  barricade  of  a  universal  dis- 
trust of  humanity  ? " 

You  must  have  detected  a  strong  accent  of 
fear  whenever  the  West  has  discussed  the 
possibility  of  the  rise  of  an  Eastern  race.  The 
reason  of  it  is  this,  that  the  power  by  whose 
help  she  thrives  is  an  evil  power ;  so  long  as  it 
is  held  on  her  own  side  she  can  be  safe,  while 
the  rest  of  the  world  trembles.  The  vital 
ambition  of  the  present  civilization  of  Europe  is 
to  have  the  exclusive  possession  of  the  devil. 
All  her  armaments  and  diplomacy  are  directed 
upon  this  one  object.  But  these  costly  rituals 
for  invocation  of  the  evil  spirit  lead  through  a 
path  of  prosperity  to  the  brink  of  cataclysm. 
The  furies  of  terror,  which  the  West  has  let 
loose  upon  God's  world,  come  back  to  threaten 
herself  and  goad  her  into  preparations  of  more 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         83 

and  more  frightfulness ;  this  gives  her  no  rest, 
and  makes  her  forget  all  else  but  the  perils  that 
she  causes  to  others  and  incurs  herself.  To  the 
worship  of  this  devil  of  politics  she  sacrifices 
other  countries  as  victims.  She  feeds  upon 
their  dead  flesh  and  grows  fat  upon  it,  so  long 
as  the  carcasses  remain  fresh, — -but  they  are  sure 
to  rot  at  last,  and  the  dead  will  take  their 
revenge,  by  spreading  pollution  far  and  wide 
and  poisoning  the  vitality  of  the  feeder.  Japan 
had  all  her  wealth  of  humanity,  her  harmony  of 
heroism  and  beauty,  her  depth  of  self-control 
and  richness  of  self-expression;  yet  the  Western 
nations  felt  no  respect  for  her  till  she  proved 
that  the  bloodhounds  of  Satan  are  not  only 
bred  in  the  kennels  of  Europe  but  can  also  be 
domesticated  in  Japan  and  fed  with  man's 
miseries.  They  admit  Japan's  equality  with 
themselves,  only  when  they  know  that  Japan 
also  possesses  the  key  to  open  the  floodgate  of 
hell -fire  upon  the  fair  earth  whenever  she 
chooses,  and  can  dance,  in  their  own  measure, 
the  devil  dance  of  pillage,  murder  and  ravish- 
ment of  innocent  women,  while  the  world  goes 
to  ruin.  We  know  that,  in  the  early  stage  of 
man's  moral  immaturity,  he  only  feels  reverence 
for  the  god  whose  malevolence  he  dreads.     But 


84  NATIONALISM 

is  this  the  ideal  of  man  which  we  can  look  up 
to  with  pride?  After  centuries  of  civilization 
nations  fearing  each  other  like  the  prowling  wild 
beasts  of  the  night-time ;  shutting  their  doors 
of  hospitality  ;  combining  only  for  purpose  of 
aggression  or  defence ;  hiding  in  their  holes 
their  trade  secrets,  state  secrets,  secrets  of  their 
armaments ;  making  peace  -  offerings  to  each 
other's  barking  dogs  with  the  meat  which  does 
not  belong  to  them ;  holding  down  fallen  races 
which  struggle  to  stand  upon  their  feet ;  with 
their  right  hands  dispensing  religion  to  weaker 
peoples,  while  robbing  them  with  their  left, — is 
there  anything  in  this  to  make  us  envious  ? 
Are  we  to  bend  our  knees  to  the  spirit  of  this 
nationalism,  which  is  sowing  broadcast  over  all 
the  world  seeds  of  fear,  greed,  suspicion,  un- 
ashamed lies  of  its  diplomacy,  and  unctuous  lies 
of  its  profession  of  peace  and  good-will  and 
universal  brotherhood  of  Man  ?  Can  our  minds 
be  free  from  doubt  when  we  rush  to  the 
Western  market  to  buy  this  foreign  product  in 
exchange  for  our  own  inheritance  ?  I  am  aware 
how  difficult  it  is  to  know  one's  self;  and  the 
man  who  is  intoxicated  furiously  denies  his 
drunkenness ;  yet  the  West  herself  is  anxiously 
thinking  of  her  problems  and  trying  experiments. 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         85 

But  she  is  like  a  glutton,  who  has  not  the  heart 
to  give  up  his  intemperance  in  eating,  and  fondly 
clings  to  the  hope  that  he  can  cure  his  nightmares 
of  indigestion  by  medicine.  Europe  is  not  ready 
to  give  up  her  political  inhumanity,  with  all  the 
baser  passions  of  man  attendant  upon  it ;  she 
believes  only  in  modification  of  systems,  and  not 
m  change  of  heart. 

We  are  willing  to  buy  their  machine-made 
systems,  not  with  our  hearts,  but  with  our 
brains.  We  shall  try  them  and  build  sheds  for 
them,  but  not  enshrine  them  in  our  homes  or 
temples.  There  are  races  who  worship  the 
animals  they  kill ;  we  can  buy  meat  from  them 
when  we  are  hungry,  but  not  the  worship  which 
goes  with  the  killing.  We  must  not  vitiate 
our  children's  minds  with  the  superstition  that 
business  is  business,  war  is  war,  politics  is 
politics.  We  must  know  that  man's  business 
has  to  be  more  than  mere  business,  and  so  should 
be  his  war  and  politics.  You  had  your  own 
industry  in  Japan ;  how  scrupulously  honest 
and  true  it  was,  you  can  see  by  its  products, — 
by  their  grace  and  strength,  their  conscientious- 
ness in  details,  where  they  can  hardly  be  observed. 
But  the  tidal  wave  of  falsehood  has  swept  over 
your  land  from  that  part  of  the  world  where 


86  NATIONALISM 

business  is  business,  and  honesty  is  followed 
merely  as  the  best  policy.  Have  you  never 
felt  shame  when  you  see  the  trade  advertise- 
ments, not  only  plastering  the  whole  town  with 
lies  and  exaggerations,  but  invading  the  green 
fields,  where  the  peasants  do  their  honest  labour, 
and  the  hill-tops,  which  greet  the  first  pure  light 
of  the  morning  ?  It  is  so  easy  to  dull  our  sense 
of  honour  and  delicacy  of  mind  with  constant 
abrasion,  while  falsehoods  stalk  abroad  with 
proud  steps  in  the  name  of  trade,  politics  and 
patriotism,  that  any  protest  against  their  per- 
petual intrusion  into  our  lives  is  considered  to 
be  sentimentalism,  unworthy  of  true  manliness. 

And  it  has  come  to  pass  that  the  children 
of  those  heroes  who  would  keep  their  word  at 
the  point  of  death,  who  would  disdain  to  cheat 
men  for  vulgar  profit,  who  even  in  their  fight 
would  much  rather  court  defeat  than  be  dis- 
honourable, have  become  energetic  in  dealing 
with  falsehoods  and  do  not  feel  humiliated  by 
gaining  advantage  from  them.  And  this  has 
been  effected  by  the  charm  of  the  word 
**  modern.'  But  if  undiluted  utility  be  modern, 
beauty  is  of  all  ages ;  if  mean  selfishness  be 
modern,  the  human  ideals  are  no  new  inven- 
tions.     And   we   must   know  for   certain    that 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         87 

however  modern  may  be  the  proficiency  which 
cripples  man  for  the  sake  of  methods  and 
machines,  it  will  never  live  to  be  old. 

But  while  trying  to  free  our  minds  from  the 
arrogant  claims  of  Europe  and  to  help  ourselves 
out  of  the  quicksands  of  our  infatuation,  we 
may  go  to  the  other  extreme  and  blind  our- 
selves with  a  wholesale  suspicion  of  the  West. 
The  reaction  of  disillusionment  is  just  as  unreal 
as  the  first  shock  of  illusion.  We  must  try  to 
come  to  that  normal  state  of  mind  by  which 
we  can  clearly  discern  our  own  danger  and  avoid 
it  without  being  unjust  towards  the  source  of 
that  danger.  There  is  always  the  natural 
temptation  in  us  of  wishing  to  pay  back  Europe 
in  her  own  coin,  and  return  contempt  for  con- 
tempt and  evil  for  evil.  But  that  again  would 
be  to  imitate  Europe  in  one  of  her  worst  features, 
which  comes  out  in  her  behaviour  to  people 
whom  she  describes  as  yellow  or  red,  brown  or 
black.  And  this  is  a  point  on  which  we  in  the 
East  have  to  acknowledge  our  guilt  and  own 
that  our  sin  has  been  as  great,  if  not  greater, 
when  we  insulted  humanity  by  treating  with 
utter  disdain  and  cruelty  men  who  belonged 
to  a  particular  creed,  colour  or  caste.  It  is 
really  because  we  are  afraid  of  our  own  weak- 


88  NATIONALISM 

ness,  which  allows  itself  to  be  overcome  by  the 
sight  of  power,  that  we  try  to  substitute  for  it 
another  weakness  which  makes  itself  blind  to 
the  glories  of  the  West.  When  we  truly  know 
the  Europe  which  is  great  and  good,  we  can 
effectively  save  ourselves  from  the  Europe 
which  is  mean  and  grasping.  It  is  easy  to  be 
unfair  in  one's  judgment  when  one  is  faced  with 
human  miseries, — and  pessimism  is  the  result 
of  building  theories  while  the  mind  is  suffering. 
To  despair  of  humanity  is  only  possible  if  we 
lose  faith  in  truth  which  brings  to  it  strength, 
when  its  defeat  is  greatest,  and  calls  out  new 
life  from  the  depth  of  its  destruction.  We 
must  admit  that  there  is  a  living  soul  in  the 
West  which  is  struggling  unobserved  against 
the  hugeness  of  the  organizations  under  which 
men,  women  and  children  are  being  crushed, 
and  whose  mechanical  necessities  are  ignoring 
laws  that  are  spiritual  and  human, — the  soul 
whose  sensibilities  refuse  to  be  dulled  com- 
pletely by  dangerous  habits  of  heedlessness  in 
dealings  with  races  for  whom  it  lacks  natural 
sympathy.  The  West  could  never  have  risen 
to  the  eminence  she  has  reached  if  her  strength 
were  merely  the  strength  of  the  brute  or  of  the 
machine.     The  divine  in  her  heart  is  suffering 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         89 

from  the  injuries  inflicted  by  her  hands  upon 
the  world,  —  and  from  this  pain  of  her  higher 
nature  flows  the  secret  balm  which  will  bring 
healing  to  those  injuries.  Time  after  time  she 
has  fought  against  herself  and  has  undone  the 
chains  which  with  her  own  hands  she  had 
fastened  round  helpless  limbs ;  and  though  she 
forced  poison  down  the  throat  of  a  great  nation 
at  the  point  of  the  sword  for  gain  of  money,  she 
herself  woke  up  to  withdraw  from  it,  to  wash 
her  hands  clean  again.  This  shows  hidden 
springs  of  humanity  in  spots  which  look  dead 
and  barren.  It  proves  that  the  deeper  truth  in 
her  nature,  which  can  survive  such  a  career  of 
cruel  cowardliness,  is  not  greed,  but  reverence 
for  unselfish  ideals.  It  would  be  altogether 
unjust,  both  to  us  and  to  Europe,  to  say  that 
she  has  fascinated  the  modern  Eastern  mind  by 
the  mere  exhibition  of  her  power.  Through 
the  smoke  of  cannons  and  dust  of  markets  the 
light  of  her  moral  nature  has  shone  bright,  and  she 
has  brought  to  us  the  ideal  of  ethical  freedom, 
whose  foundation  lies  deeper  than  social  conven- 
tions and  whose  province  of  activity  is  world-wide. 
The  East  has  instinctively  felt,  even  through 
her  aversion,  that  she  has  a  great  deal  to  learn 
from  Europe,  not  merely  about  the  materials  of 


90  NATIONALISM 

power,  but  about  its  inner  source,  which  is  of 
mind  and  of  the  moral  nature  of  man.  Europe 
has  been  teaching  us  the  higher  obligations  of 
public  good  above  those  of  the  family  and  the 
clan,  and  the  sacredness  of  law,  which  makes 
society  independent  of  individual  caprice,  secures 
for  it  continuity  of  progress,  and  guarantees 
justice  to  all  men  of  all  positions  in  life.  Above 
all  things  Europe  has  held  high  before  our 
minds  the  banner  of  liberty,  through  centuries 
of  martyrdom  and  achievement,  —  liberty  of 
conscience,  liberty  of  thought  and  action,  liberty 
in  the  ideals  of  art  and  literature.  And  because 
Europe  has  won  our  deep  respect,  she  has  become 
so  dangerous  for  us  where  she  is  turbulently 
weak  and  false, — dangerous  like  poison  when 
it  is  served  along  with  our  best  food.  There  is 
one  safety  for  us  upon  which  we  hope  we  may 
count,  and  that  is,  that  we  can  claim  Europe 
herself  as  our  ally  in  our  resistance  to  her 
temptations  and  to  her  violent  encroachments ; 
for  she  has  ever  carried  her  own  standard  of 
perfection,  by  which  we  can  measure  her  falls 
and  gauge  her  degrees  of  failure,  by  which  we 
can  call  her  before  her  own  tribunal  and  put  her 
to  shame, — the  shame  which  is  the  sign  of  the 
true  pride  of  nobleness. 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN         91 

But  our  fear  is,  that  the  poison  may  be  more 
powerful  than  the  food,  and  what  is  strength  in 
her  to-day  may  not  be  the  sign  of  health,  but  the 
contrary ;  for  it  may  be  temporarily  caused  by 
the  upsetting  of  the  balance  of  life.  Our  fear  is 
that  evil  has  a  fateful  fascination  when  it  assumes 
dimensions  which  are  colossal, — and  though  at 
last  it  is  sure  to  lose  its  centre  of  gravity  by  its 
abnormal  disproportion,  the  mischief  which  it 
creates  before  its  fall  may  be  beyond  reparation. 

Therefore  I  ask  you  to  have  the  strength  of 
faith  and  clarity  of  mind  to  know  for  certain  that 
the  lumbering  structure  of  modern  progress, 
riveted  by  the  iron  bolts  of  efficiency,  which 
runs  upon  the  wheels  of  ambition,  cannot  hold 
together  for  long.  Collisions  are  certain  to 
occur ;  for  it  has  to  travel  upon  organized  lines, 
it  is  too  heavy  to  choose  its  own  course  freely ; 
and  once  it  is  off  the  rails,  its  endless  train  of 
vehicles  is  dislocated.  A  day  will  come  when  it 
will  fall  in  a  heap  of  ruin  and  cause  serious  ob- 
struction to  the  traffic  of  the  world.  Do  we  not 
see  signs  of  this  even  now  ?  Does  not  the  voice 
come  to  us,  through  the  din  of  war,  the  shrieks 
of  hatred,  the  wailings  of  despair,  through  the 
churning  up  of  the  unspeakable  filth  which  has 
been  accumulating  for  ages  in  the  bottom  of  this 


92  NATIONALISM 

nationalism, — the  voice  which  cries  to  our  soul 
that  the  tower  of  national  selfishness,  which  goes 
by  the  name  of  patriotism,  which  has  raised  its 
banner  of  treason  against  heaven,  must  totter 
and  fall  with  a  crash,  weighed  down  by  its  own 
bulk,  its  flag  kissing  the  dust,  its  light  extin- 
guished ?  My  brothers,  when  the  red  Hght  of 
conflagration  sends  up  its  crackle  of  laughter  to 
the  stars,  keep  your  faith  upon  those  stars  and 
not  upon  the  fire  of  destruction.  For  when 
this  conflagration  consumes  itself  and  dies  down, 
leaving  its  memorial  in  ashes,  the  eternal  light 
will  again  shine  in  the  East, — the  East  which 
has  been  the  birthplace  of  the  morning  sun  of 
man's  history.  And  who  knows  if  that  day  has 
not  already  dawned,  and  the  sun  not  risen,  in  the 
Easternmost  horizon  of  Asia  ?  And  I  offer,  as 
did  my  ancestor  rishis,  my  salutation  to  that 
sunrise  of  the  East,  which  is  destined  once  again 
to  illumine  the  whole  world. 

I  know  my  voice  is  too  feeble  to  raise  itself 
above  the  uproar  of  this  bustling  time,  and  it  is 
easy  for  any  street  urchin  to  fling  against  me  the 
epithet  of  '*  unpractical."  It  will  stick  to  my 
coat-tail,  never  to  be  washed  away,  effectively 
excluding  me  from  the  consideration  of  all  re- 
spectable persons.     I  know  what  a  risk  one  runs 


NATIONALISM  IN  JAPAN  93 

from  the  vigorously  athletic  crowds  in  being 
styled  an  idealist  in  these  days,  when  thrones 
have  lost  their  dignity  and  prophets  have  become 
an  anachronism,  when  the  sound  that  drowns  all 
voices  is  the  noise  of  the  market-place.  Yet 
when,  one  day,  standing  on  the  outskirts  of 
Yokohama  town,  bristling  with  its  display  of 
modern  miscellanies,  I  watched  the  sunset  in 
your  southern  sea,  and  saw  its  peace  and  majesty 
among  your  pine -clad  hills, — with  the  great 
Fujiyama  growing  faint  against  the  golden  hori- 
zon, like  a  god  overcome  with  his  own  radiance, 
— the  music  of  eternity  welled  up  through  the 
evening  silence,  and  I  felt  that  the  sky  and  the 
earth  and  the  lyrics  of  the  dawn  and  the  dayfall 
are  with  the  poets  and  idealists,  and  not  with 
the  marketmen  robustly  contemptuous  of  all 
sentiment, — that,  after  the  forgetfulness  of  his 
own  divinity,  man  will  remember  again  that 
heaven  is  always  in  touch  with  his  world,  which 
can  never  be  abandoned  for  good  to  the  hounding 
wolves  of  the  modern  era,  scenting  human  blood 
and  howling  to  the  skies. 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA 


95 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA 

OuE  real  problem  in  India  is  not  political.     It  is 
social.     This  is  a  condition  not  only  prevailing  in 
India,  but  among  all  nations.     I  do  not  believe 
in  an  exclusive  political  interest.     Politics  in  tVie 
West  have  dominated  Western  ideals,  and  we  in 
India  are  trying  to  imitate  you.     We  have  to 
remember  that  in  Europe,  where   peoples   had 
their  racial  unity  from  the  beginning,  and  where 
natural  resources  were  insufficient  for  the  inhabit- 
ants, the   civilization   has   naturally   taken    the 
character  of  political  and  commercial  aggressive- 
ness.    For  on  the  one  hand  they  had  no  internal 
complications,  and  on  the  other  they  had  to  deal 
with  neighbours  who  were  strong  and  rapacious. 
To  have  perfect  combination  among  themselves 
and   a   watchful   attitude   of  animosity  against 
others    was    taken    as   the    solution    of    their 
problems.     In  former  days  they  organized   and 
plundered,  in  the  present   age  the   same   spirit 

97  H 


98  NATIONALISM 

continues — and  they  organize  and  exploit  the 
whole  world. 

But  from  the  earliest  beginnings  of  history- 
India  has  had  her  own  problem  constantly  before 
her — it  is  the  race  problem.  Each  nation  must 
be  conscious  of  its  mission,  and  we,  in  India, 
must  realize  that  we  cut  a  poor  figure  when  we 
are  trying  to  be  political,  simply  because  we  have 
not  yet  been  finally  able  to  accomplish  what  was 
set  before  us  by  our  providence. 

This  problem  of  race  unity  which  we  have 
been  trying  to  solve  for  so  many  years  has  like- 
wise to  be  faced  by  you  here  in  America.  Many 
people  in  this  country  ask  me  what  is  happening 
as  to  the  caste  distinctions  in  India.  But  when 
this  question  is  asked  me,  it  is  usually  done  with 
a  superior  air.  And  I  feel  tempted  to  put  the 
same  question  to  our  American  critics  with  a 
slight  modification,  "  What  have  you  done  with 
the  Bed  Indian  and  the  Negro  ? "  For  you  have 
not  got  over  your  attitude  of  caste  toward  them. 
You  have  used  violent  methods  to  keep  aloof 
from  other  races,  but  until  you  have  solved  the 
question  here  in  America,  you  have  no  right  to 
question  India. 

In  spite  of  our  great  difficulty,  however,  India 
has  done  something.     She  has  tried  to  make  an 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA  99 

adjustment  of  races,  to  acknowledge  the  real 
differences  between  them  where  these  exist,  and 
yet  seek  for  some  basis  of  unity.  This  basis  has 
come  through  our  saints,  like  Nanak,  Kabir, 
Chaitnaya  and  others,  preaching  one  God  to  all 
races  of  India. 

In  finding  the  solution  of  our  problem  we  shall 
have  helped  to  solve  the  world  problem  as  well. 
What  India  has  been,  the  whole  world  is  now. 
The  whole  world  is  becoming  one  country 
through  scientific  facility.  And  the  moment  is 
arriving  when  you  also  must  find  a  basis  of  unity 
which  is  not  political.  If  India  can  offer  to  the 
world  her  solution,  it  will  be  a  contribution  to 
humanity.  There  is  only  one  history — the  his- 
tory of  man.  All  national  histories  are  merely 
chapters  in  the  larger  one.  And  we  are  content 
in  India  to  suffer  for  such  a  great  cause. 

Each  individual  has  his  self-love.  Therefore 
his  brute  instinct  leads  him  to  fight  with  others 
in  the  sole  pursuit  of  his  self-interest.  But  man 
has  also  his  higher  instincts  of  sympathy  and 
mutual  help.  The  people  who  are  lacking  in  this 
higher  moral  power  and  who  therefore  cannot 
combine  in  fellowship  with  one  another  must  j 
perish  or  live  in  a  state  of  degradation.  Only 
those  peoples  have  survived  and  achieved  civiliza- 


100  NATIONALISM 

tion  who  have  this  spirit  of  co-operation  strong 
in  them.  So  we  find  that  from  the  beginning  of 
history  men  had  to  choose  between  fighting  with 
one  another  and  combining,  between  serving  their 
own  interest  or  the  common  interest  of  all. 

In  our  early  history,  when  the  geographical 
limits  of  each  country  and  also  the  facilities  of 
communication  were  small,  this  problem  was  com- 
paratively small  in  dimension.  It  was  sufficient 
for  men  to  develop  their  sense  of  unity  within 
their  area  of  segregation.  In  those  days  they 
combined  among  themselves  and  fought  against 
others.  But  it  was  this  moral  spirit  of  combina- 
tion which  was  the  true  basis  of  their  greatness, 
and  this  fostered  their  art,  science  and  religion. 
At  that  early  time  the  most  important  fact  that 
man  had  to  take  count  of  was  the  fact  of  the 
members  of  one  particular  race  of  men  coming 
in  close  contact  with  one  another.  Those  who 
truly  grasped  this  fact  through  their  higher  nature 
made  their  mark  in  history. 

The  most  important  fact  of  the  present  age 
is  that  all  the  different  races  of  men  have  come 
close  together.  And  again  we  are  confronted 
with  two  alternatives.  The  problem  is  whether 
the  different  groups  of  peoples  shall  go  on  fight- 
ing with  one  another  or  find  out  some  true  basis 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        101 

of  reconciliation  and  mutual  help ;  whether  it 
will  be  interminable  competition  or  co-operation. 

I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  those  who 
are  gifted  with  the  moral  power  of  love  and 
vision  of  spiritual  unity,  who  have  the  least 
feeling  of  enmity  against  aliens,  and  the  sym- 
pathetic insight  to  place  themselves  in  the  posi- 
tion of  others,  will  be  the  fittest  to  take  their 
permanent  place  in  the  age  that  is  lying  before 
us,  and  those  who  are  constantly  developing 
their  instinct  of  fight  and  intolerance  of  aliens 
will  be  eliminatfid^t  For  this  is  the  problem 
before  us,  and  we  have  to  prove  our  humanity 
by  solving  it  through  the  help  of  our  higher 
nature.  The  gigantic  organizations  for  hurting 
others  and  warding  off  their  blows,  for  making 
money  by  dragging  others  back,  will  not  help 
us.  On  the  contrary,  by  their  crushing  weight, 
their  enormous  cost  and  their  deadening  effect 
upon  living  humanity,  they  will  seriously  im- 
pede our  freedom  in  the  larger  life  of  a  higher 
civilization. 

During  the  evolution  of  the  Nation  the 
moral  culture  of  brotherhood  was  limited  by 
geographical  boundaries,  because  at  that  time 
those  boundaries  were  true.  Now  they  have 
become  imaginary  lines  of  tradition  divested  of 


102  NATIONALISM 

the  qualities  of  real  obstacles.  So  the  time  has 
come  when  man's  moral  nature  must  deal  with 
this  great  fact  with  all  seriousness  or  perish. 
The  first  impulse  of  this  change  of  circumstance 
has  been  the  churning  up  of  man's  baser  passions 
of  greed  and  cruel  hatred.  If  this  persists  in- 
definitely, and  armaments  go  on  exaggerating 
themselves  to  unimaginable  absurdities,  and 
machines  and  storehouses  envelop  this  fair  earth 
with  their  dirt  and  smoke  and  ugliness,  then  it 
will  end  in  a  conflagration  of  suicide.  Therefore 
man  will  have  to  exert  all  his  power  of  love  and 
clarity  of  vision  to  make  another  great  moral  ad- 
justment which  will  comprehend  the  whole  world 
of  men  and  not  merely  the  fractional  groups  of 
nationality.  The  call  has  come  to  every  in- 
dividual in  the  present  age  to  prepare  himself 
and  his  surroundings  for  this  dawn  of  a  new  era, 
when  man  shall  discover  his  soul  in  the  spiritual 
unity  of  all  human  beings. 

If  it  is  given  at  all  to  the  West  to  struggle 
out  of  these  tangles  of  the  lower  slopes  to  the 
spiritual  summit  of  humanity  then  I  cannot  but 
think  that  it  is  the  special  mission  of  America  to 
fulfil  this  hope  of  God  and  man.  You  are  the 
country  of  expectation,  desiring  something  else 
than  what  is.     Europe  has  her  subtle  habits  of 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        103 

mind  and  her  conventions.  But  America,  as  yet, 
has  come  to  no  conclusions.  I  realize  how  much 
America  is  untrammelled  by  the  traditions  of  the 
past,  and  I  can  appreciate  that  experimentalism 
is  a  sign  of  America's  youth.  The  foundation 
of  her  glory  is  in  the  future,  rather  than  in  the 
past ;  and  if  one  is  gifted  with  the  power  of  clair- 
voyance, one  will  be  able  to  love  the  America 
that  is  to  be. 

America  is  destined  to  justify  Western  civiliza- 
tion to  the  East.  Europe  has  lost  faith  in 
humanity,  and  has  become  distrustful  and  sickly. 
America,  on  the  other  hand,  is  not  pessimistic  or 
blas^.  You  know,  as  a  people,  that  there  is  such 
a  thing  as  a  better  and  a  best ;  and  that  know- 
ledge drives  you  on.  There  are  habits  that  are 
not  merely  passive  but  aggressively  arrogant. 
They  are  not  like  mere  walls,  but  are  like  hedges 
of  stinging  nettles.  Europe  has  been  cultivating 
these  hedges  of  habits  for  long  years,  till  they 
have  grown  round  her  dense  and  strong  and  high. 
The  pride  of  her  traditions  has  sent  its  roots  deep 
into  her  heart.  I  do  not  wish  to  contend  that  it 
is  unreasonable.  But  pride  in  every  form  breeds 
blindness  at  the  end.  Like  all  artificial  stimu- 
lants its  first  effect  is  a  heightening  of  conscious- 
ness, and  then  with  the  increasing  dose  it  muddles 


104  NATIONALISM 

it  and  brings  an  exultation  that  is  misleading. 
Europe  has  gradually  grown  hardened  in  her 
pride  in  all  her  outer  and  inner  habits.  She  not 
only  cannot  forget  that  she  is  Western,  but  she 
takes  every  opportunity  to  hurl  this  fact  against 
others  to  humiliate  them.  This  is  why  she  is 
growing  incapable  of  imparting  to  the  East  what 
is  best  in  herself,  and  of  accepting  in  a  right 
spirit  the  wisdom  that  the  East  has  stored  for 
centuries. 

In  America  national  habits  and  traditions 
have  not  had  time  to  spread  their  clutching 
roots  round  your  hearts.  You  have  constantly 
felt  and  complained  of  your  disadvantages  when 
you  compared  your  nomadic  restlessness  with 
the  settled  traditions  of  Europe — the  Europe 
which  can  show  her  picture  of  greatness  to  the 
best  advantage  because  she  can  fix  it  against 
the  background  of  the  Past.  But  in  this  present 
age  of  transition,  when  a  new  era  of  civilization 
is  sending  its  trumpet-call  to  all  peoples  of  the 
world  across  an  unlimited  future,  this  very  free- 
dom of  detachment  will  enable  you  to  accept  its 
invitation  and  to  achieve  the  goal  for  which 
Europe  began  her  journey  but  lost  herself  mid- 
way. For  she  was  tempted  out  of  her  path  by 
her  pride  of  power  and  greed  of  possession. 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        105 

Not    merely   your    freedom    from    habits   of 
mind  in  individuals,   but    also   the  freedom   of 
your  history  from  all  unclean  entanglements,  fits 
you   in   your  career   of  holding  the  banner   of 
civilization  of  the  future.     All  the  great  nations 
of  Europe  have  their  victims  in  other  parts  of 
the  world.     This  not  only  deadens  their  moral 
sympathy  but  also  their  intellectual  sympathy, 
which  is  so  necessary  for  the  understanding  of 
races    which    are    different    from    one's    own. 
Englishmen  can  never  truly  understand  India, 
because  their  minds  are  not  disinterested  with 
regard    to    that    country.       If    you    compare 
England    with    Germany    or    France    you    will 
find  she  has  produced  the  smallest  number  of 
scholars  who  have  studied  Indian  literature  and 
philosophy   with   any   amount    of   sympathetic 
insight    or     thoroughness.      This    attitude     of 
apathy    and    contempt    is    natural    where    the 
relationship    is    abnormal    and    founded    upon 
national  selfishness  and  pride.     But  your  history 
has  been  disinterested,  and  that  is  why  you  have 
been  able  to  help  Japan  in  her  lessons  in  Western 
civilization,  and  that  is  why  China  can  look  upon 
you  with  her  best  confidence  in  this  her  darkest 
period  of  danger.     In  fact  you  are  carrying  all 
the  responsibility  of  a  great  future  because  you 


106  NATIONALISM 

are  untrammelled  by  the  grasping  miserliness 
of  a  past.  Therefore  of  all  countries  of  the 
earth  America  has  to  be  fully  conscious  of  this 
future,  her  vision  must  not  be  obscured  and 
her  faith  in  humanity  must  be  strong  with  the 
strength  of  youth. 

A  parallelism  exists  between  America  and 
India — the  parallelism  of  welding  together  into 
one  body  various  races. 

In  my  country  we  have  been  seeking  to  find 
out  something  common  to  all  races,  which  will 
prove  their  real  unity.  No  nation  looking  for 
a  mere  political  or  commercial  basis  of  unity 
will  find  such  a  solution  sufficient.  Men  of 
thought  and  power  will  discover  the  spiritual 
unity,  will  realize  it,  and  preach  it. 

India  has  never  had  a  real  sense  of  nationalism. 
Even  though  from  childhood  I  had  been  taught 
that  idolatry  of  the  Nation  is  almost  better  than 
reverence  for  God  and  humanity,  I  believe  I 
have  outgrown  that  teaching,  and  it  is  my 
conviction  that  my  countrymen  will  truly  gain 
their  India  by  fighting  against  the  education 
which  teaches  them  that  a  country  is  greater 
than  the  ideals  of  humanity. 

The  educated  Indian  at  present  is  trying  to 
absorb   some   lessons   from  history  contrary  to 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        107 

the  lessons  of  our  ancestors.  The  East,  in  fact, 
is  attempting  to  take  unto  itself  a  history  which 
is  not  the  outcome  of  its  own  living.  Japan, 
for  example,  thinks  she  is  getting  powerful 
through  adopting  Western  methods,  but,  after 
she  has  exhausted  her  inheritance,  only  the 
borrowed  weapons  of  civilization  will  remain 
to  her.  She  will  not  have  developed  herself 
from  within. 

Europe  has  her  past.  Europe's  strength 
therefore  lies  in  her  history.  We,  in  India, 
must  make  up  our  minds  that  we  cannot 
borrow  other  people's  history,  and  that  if  we 
stifle  our  own  we  are  committing  suicide. 
When  you  borrow  things  that  do  not  be- 
long to  your  life,  they  only  serve  to  crush  your  j 
life. 

And  therefore  I  believe  that  it  does  India  no 
good  to  compete  with  Western  civilization  in  its 
own  field.  But  we  shall  be  more  than  compen- 
sated if,  in  spite  of  the  insults  heaped  upon  us, 
we  follow  our  own  destiny. 

There  are  lessons  which  impart  information  or 
train  our  minds  for  intellectual  pursuits.  These 
are  simple  and  can  be  acquired  and  used  with 
advantage.  But  there  are  others  which  affect 
our  deeper  nature  and  change  our  direction  of 


108  NATIONALISM 

life.  Before  we  accept  them  and  pay  their  vahie 
by  selling  our  own  inheritance,  we  must  pause 
and  think  deeply.  In  man's  history  there  come 
ages  of  fireworks  which  dazzle  us  by  their  force 
and  movement.  They  laugh  not  only  at  our 
modest  household  lamps  but  als6  at  the  eternal 
stars.  But  let  us  not  for  that  provocation  be 
precipitate  in  our  desire  to  dismiss  our  lamps. 
Let  us  patiently  bear  our  present  insult  and 
realize  that  these  fireworks  have  splendour  but 
not  permanence,  because  of  the  extreme  ex- 
plosiveness  which  is  the  cause  of  their  power, 
and  also  of  their  exhaustion.  They  are  spend- 
ing a  fatal  quantity  of  energy  and  substance 
compared  to  their  gain  and  production. 

Anyhow,  our  ideals  have  been  evolved  through 
our  own  history,  and  even  if  we  wished  we  could 
only  make  poor  fireworks  of  them,  because  their 
materials  are  different  from  yours,  as  is  also 
their  moral  purpose.  If  we  cherish  the  desire  of 
paying  our  all  to  buy  a  political  nationality  it 
will  be  as  absurd  as  if  Switzerland  had  staked 
her  existence  on  her  ambition  to  build  up  a 
navy  powerful  enough  to  compete  with  that  of 
England.  The  mistake  that  we  make  is  in 
thinking  that  mans  channel  of  greatness  is 
only  one — the  one  which  has  made  itself  pain- 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        109 

fully  evident  for  the  time  being  by  its  depth  of 
insolence. 

We  must  know  for  certain  that  there  is  a 
future  before  us  and  that  future  is  waiting  for 
those  who  are  rich  in  moral  ideals  and  not  in 
mere  things.  And  it  is  the  privilege  of  man  to 
work  for  fruits  that  are  beyond  his  immediate 
reach,  and  to  adjust  his  life  not  in  slavish  con- 
formity to  the  examples  of  some  present  success 
or  even  to  his  own  prudent  past,  limited  in  its 
aspiration,  but  to  an  infinite  future  bearing  in 
its  heart  the  ideals  of  our  highest  expectations. 

We  must  recognize  that  it  is  providential  that 
the  West  has  come  to  India.  And  yet  some 
one  must  show  the  East  to  the  West,  and  con- 
vince the  West  that  the  East  has  her  contribu- 
tion to  make  to  the  history  of  civilization.  India 
is  no  beggar  of  the  West.  And  yet  even  though 
the  West  may  think  she  is,  I  am  not  for  thrust- 
ing oif  Western  civilization  and  becoming  segre- 
gated in  our  independence.  Let  us  have  a  deep 
association.  If  Providence  wants  England  to 
be  the  channel  of  that  communication,  of  that 
deeper  association,  I  am  willing  to  accept  it 
with  all  humility.  I  have  great  faith  in  human 
nature,  and  I  think  the  West  will  find  its  true 
mission.     I  speak  bitterly  of  Western  civilization 


110  NATIONALISM 

when  I  am  conscious  that  it  is  betraying  its  trust 
and  thwarting  its  own  purpose.  The  West  must 
not  make  herself  a  curse  to  the  world  by  using 
her  power  for  her  own  selfish  needs,  but,  by 
teaching  the  ignorant  and  helping  the  weak,  she 
should  save  herself  from  the  worst  danger  that 
the  strong  is  liable  to  incur  by  making  the  feeble 
acquire  power  enough  to  resist  her  intrusion. 
And  also  she  must  not  make  her  materialism  to 
be  the  final  thing,  but  must  realize  that  she  is 
doing  a  service  in  freeing  the  spiritual  being 
from  the  tyranny  of  matter. 

I  am  not  against  one  nation  in  particular,  but 
against  the  general  idea  of  all  nations.  What  is 
the  Nation  ? 

It  is  the  aspect  of  a  whole  people  as  an 
organized  power.  This  organization  incessantly 
keeps  up  the  insistence  of  the  population  on 
becoming  strong  and  efficient.  But  this  strenu- 
ous effort  after  strength  and  efficiency  drains 
man  s  energy  from  his  higher  nature  where  he 
is  self-sacrificing  and  creative.  For  thereby 
man's  power  of  sacrifice  is  diverted  from  his 
ultimate  object,  which  is  moral,  to  the  main- 
tenance of  this  organization,  which  is  mechanical. 
Yet  in  this  he  feels  all  the  satisfaction  of  moral 
exaltation    and    therefore    becomes    supremely 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        111 

dangerous  to  humanity.  He  feels  relieved  of 
the  urging  of  his  conscience  when  he  can 
transfer  his  responsibility  to  this  machine  which 
is  the  creation  of  his  intellect  and  not  of  his 
complete  moral  personality.  By  this  device 
the  people  which  loves  freedom  perpetuates 
slavery  in  a  large  portion  of  the  world  with  the 
comfortable  feeling  of  pride  of  having  done  its 
duty  ;  men  who  are  naturally  just  can  be  cruelly 
unjust  both  in  their  act  and  their  thought, 
accompanied  by  a  feeling  that  they  are  helping 
the  world  to  receive  its  deserts;  men  who  are 
honest  can  blindly  go  on  robbing  others  of  their 
human  rights  for  self-aggrandizement,  all  the 
while  abusing  the  deprived  for  not  deserving 
better  treatment.  We  have  seen  in  our  every- 
day life  even  small  organizations  of  business 
and  profession  produce  callousness  of  feeling 
in  men  who  are  not  naturally  bad,  and  we  can 
well  imagine  what  a  moral  havoc  it  is  causing 
in  a  world  where  whole  peoples  are  furiously 
organizing  themselves  for  gaining  wealth  and 
power. 

Nationalism  is  a  great  menace.  It  is  the 
particular  thing  which  for  years  has  been  at 
the  bottom  of  India's  troubles.  And  inasmuch 
as   we  have   been   ruled   and   dominated  by  a 


V 


112  NATIONALISM 

nation  that  is  strictly  political  in  its  attitude, 
we  have  tried  to  develop  within  ourselves, 
despite  our  inheritance  from  the  past,  a  belief 
in  our  eventual  political  destiny. 

There  are  different  parties  in  India,  with 
different  ideals.  Some  are  struggling  for 
political  independence.  Others  think  that  the 
time  has  not  arrived  for  that,  and  yet  believe 
that  India  should  have  the  rights  that  the 
English  colonies  have.  They  wish  to  gain 
autonomy  as  far  as  possible. 

In  the  beginning  of  the  history  of  political 

agitation  in    India  there   was  not   the    conflict 

between    parties   which   there    is   to-day.      At 

that    time   there  was    a   party   known    as    the 

Indian    Congress ;    it   had   no  real   programme. 

They  had  a  few  grievances  for  redress  by  the 

authorities.     They  wanted  larger  representation 

in   the   Council   House,  and   more  freedom  in 

Municipal   government.      They   wanted   scraps 

of  things,  but  they  had  no  constructive  ideal. 

Therefore  I  was  lacking  in  enthusiasm  for  their 

methods.       It    was    my    conviction    that    what 

India    most     needed    was     constructive    work 

coming  from  within  herself     In  this  work  we 

must  take  all  risks  and  go  on  doing  the  duties 

which  by  right  are  ours,  though  in  the  teeth  of 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        113 

persecution ;  winning  moral  victory  at  every 
step,  by  our  failure  and  suffering.  We  must 
show  those  who  are  over  us  that  we  have  in 
ourselves  the  strength  of  moral  power,  the  power 
to  suffer  for  truth.  Where  we  have  nothing 
to  show,  we  have  only  to  beg.  It  would  be 
mischievous  if  the  gifts  we  wish  for  were  granted 
to  us  at  once,  and  I  have  told  my  countrymen, 
time  and  again,  to  combine  for  the  work  of 
creating  opportunities  to  give  vent  to  our  spirit 
of  self-sacrifice,  and  not  for  the  purpose  of 
begging. 

The  party,  however,  lost  power  because  the 
people  soon  came  to  realize  how  futile  was  the 
half  policy  adopted  by  them.  The  party  split, 
and  there  arrived  the  Extremists,  who  advocated 
independence  of  action,  and  discarded  the  begging 
method, — the  easiest  method  of  relieving  one's 
mind  from  his  responsibility  towards  his  country. 
Their  ideals  were  based  on  Western  history. 
They  had  no  sympathy  with  the  special  problems 
of  India.  They  did  not  recognize  the  patent 
fact  that  there  were  causes  in  our  social  organiza- 
tion which  made  the  Indian  incapable  of  coping 
with  the  alien.  What  should  we  do  if,  for  any 
reason,  England  was  driven  away  ?     We  should 

simply  be  victims  for  other  nations.     The  same 

I 


114  NATIONALISM 

social  weaknesses  would  prevail.  The  thing  we 
in  India  have  to  think  of  is  this — to  remove 
those  social  customs  and  ideals  which  have 
generated  a  want  of  self-respect  and  a  complete 
dependence  on  those  above  us, — a  state  of  affairs 
which  has  been  brought  about  entirely  by  the 
domination  in  India  of  the  caste  system,  and 
the  blind  and  lazy  habit  of  relying  upon  the 
authority  of  traditions  that  are  incongruous 
anachronisms  in  the  present  age. 

Once  again  I  draw  your  attention  to  the  diffi- 
culties India  has  had  to  encounter  and  her 
struggle  to  overcome  them.  Her  problem  was 
the  problem  of  the  world  in  miniature.  India  is 
too  vast  in  its  area  and  too  diverse  in  its  races. 
It  is  many  countries  packed  in  one  geographical 
receptacle.  It  is  just  the  opposite  of  what 
Europe  truly  is,  namely,  one  country  made  into 
many.  Thus  Europe  in  its  culture  and  growth 
has  had  the  advantage  of  the  strength  of  the 
many  as  well  as  the  strength  of  the  one.  India, 
on  the  contrary,  being  naturally  many,  yet  ad- 
ventitiously one,  has  all  along  suffered  from  the 
looseness  of  its  diversity  and  the  feebleness  of  its 
unity.  A  true  unity  is  like  a  round  globe,  it 
rolls  on,  carrying  its  burden  easily  ;  but  diversity 
is  a  many-cornered  thing  which  has  to  be  dragged 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        115 

and  pushed  with  all  force.  Be  it  said  to  the 
credit  of  India  that  this  diversity  was  not  her 
own  creation  ;  she  has  had  to  accept  it  as  a  fact 
from  the  beginning  of  her  history.  In  America 
and  Australia,  Europe  has  simplified  her  problem 
by  almost  exterminating  the  original  population. 
Even  in  the  present  age  this  spirit  of  extermina- 
tion is  making  itself  manifest,  in  the  inhospitable 
shutting  out  of  aliens,  by  those  who  themselves 
were  aliens  in  the  lands  they  now  occupy.  But 
India  tolerated  difference  of  races  from  the  first, 
and  that  spirit  of  toleration  has  acted  all  through 
her  history. 

Her  caste  system  is  the  outcome  of  this  spirit 
of  toleration.  For  India  has  all  along  been 
trying  experiments  in  evolving  a  social  unity 
within  which  all  the  different  peoples  could  be 
held  together,  while  fully  enjoying  the  freedom 
of  maintaining  their  own  differences.  The  tie 
has  been  as  loose  as  possible,  yet  as  close  as  the 
circumstances  permitted.  This  has  produced 
something  like  a  United  States  of  a  social 
federation,  whose  common  name  is  Hinduism. 

India  had  felt  that  diversity  of  races  there 
must  be  and  should  be,  whatever  may  be  its 
drawback,  and  you  can  never  coerce  nature  into 
your  narrow  limits  of  convenience  without  paying 


116  NATIONALISM 

one  day  very  dearly  for  it.  In  this  India  was 
right ;  but  what  she  failed  to  realize  was  that  in 
human  beings  differences  are  not  like  the  physical 
barriers  of  mountains,  fixed  for  ever — they  are 
fluid  with  life's  flow,  they  are  changing  their 
courses  and  their  shapes  and  volume. 

Therefore  in  her  caste  regulations  India  recog- 
nized differences,  but  not  the  mutability  which  is 
the  law  of  life.  In  trying  to  avoid  collisions  she 
set  up  boundaries  of  immovable  walls,  thus  giving 
to  her  numerous  races  the  negative  benefit  of 
peace  and  order  but  not  the  positive  opportunity 
of  expansion  and  movement.  She  accepted 
nature  where  it  produces  diversity,  but  ignored 
it  where  it  uses  that  diversity  for  its  world-game 
of  infinite  permutations  and  combinations.  She 
treated  life  in  all  truth  where  it  is  manifold,  but 
insulted  it  where  it  is  ever  moving.  Therefore 
Life  departed  from  her  social  system  and  in  its 
place  she  is  worshipping  with  ail  ceremony  the 
magnificent  cage  of  countless  compartments  that 
she  has  manufactured. 

The  same  thing  happened  where  she  tried  to 
ward  off  the  collisions  of  trade  interests.  She 
associated  different  trades  and  professions  with 
different  castes.  This  had  the  effect  of  allaying 
for  good  the  interminable  jealousy  and  hatred 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        117 

of  competition — the  competition  which  breeds 
cruelty  and  makes  the  atmosphere  thick  with 
lies  and  deception.  In  this  also  India  laid  all 
her  emphasis  upon  the  law  of  heredity,  ignoring 
the  law  of  mutation,  and  thus  gradually  reduced 
arts  into  crafts  and  genius  into  skill. 

However,  what  Western  observers  fail  to 
discern  is  that  in  her  caste  system  India  in  all 
seriousness  accepted  her  responsibility  to  solve 
the  race  problem  in  such  a  manner  as  to  avoid 
all  friction,  and  yet  to  afford  each  race  freedom 
within  its  boundaries.  Let  us  admit  India  has 
not  in  this  achieved  a  full  measure  of  success. 
But  this  you  must  also  concede,  that  the  West, 
being  more  favourably  situated  as  to  homogeneity 
of  races,  has  never  given  her  attention  to  this 
problem,  and  whenever  confronted  with  it  she  has 
tried  to  make  it  easy  by  ignoring  it  altogether. 
And  this  is  the  source  of  her  anti- Asiatic  agita- 
tions for  depriving  aliens  of  their  right  to  earn 
their  honest  living  on  these  shores.  In  most 
of  your  colonies  you  only  admit  them  on  con- 
dition of  their  accepting  the  menial  position  of 
hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water.  Either 
you  shut  your  doors  against  the  aliens  or  reduce 
them  into  slavery.  And  this  is  your  solution  of 
the  problem  of  race-conflict.     Whatever  may  be 


118  NATIONALISM 

its  merits  you  will  have  to  admit  that  it  does 
not  spring  from  the  higher  impulses  of  civiliza- 
tion, but  from  the  lower  passions  of  greed  and 
hatred.  You  say  this  is  human  nature — and 
India  also  thought  she  knew  human  nature  when 
she  strongly  barricaded  her  race  distinctions  by 
the  fixed  barriers  of  social  gradations.  But  we 
have  found  out  to  our  cost  that  human  nature  is 
not  what  it  seems,  but  what  it  is  in  truth  ;  which 
is  in  its  infinite  possibilities.  And  when  we  in 
our  blindness  hisult  humanity  for  its  ragged 
appearance  it  sheds  its  disguise  to  disclose  to  us 
that  we  have  insulted  our  God.  The  degrada- 
tion which  we  cast  upon  others  in  our  pride  or 
self-interest  degrades  our  own  humanity — and 
this  is  the  punishment  which  is  most  terrible, 
because  we  do  not  detect  it  till  it  is  too  late. 

Not  only  in  your  relation  with  aliens  but  with 
the  different  sections  of  your  own  society  you 
have  not  achieved  harmony  of  reconciliation. 
The  spirit  of  conflict  and  competition  is  allowed 
the  full  freedom  of  its  reckless  career.  And 
because  its  genesis  is  the  greed  of  wealth  and 
power  it  can  never  come  to  any  other  end  but 
to  a  violent  death.  In  India  the  production  of 
commodities  was  brought  under  the  law  of  social 
adjustments.     Its  basis  was  co-operation,  having 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        119 

for  its  object  the  perfect  satisfaction  of  social 
needs.  Bat  in  the  West  it  is  guided  by  the 
impulse  of  competition,  whose  end  is  the  gain 
of  wealth  for  individuals.  But  the  individual 
is  like  the  geometrical  line  ;  it  is  length  without 
breadth.  It  has  not  got  the  depth  to  be  able 
to  hold  anything  permanently.  Therefore  its 
greed  or  gain  can  never  come  to  finality.  In 
its  lengthening  process  of  growth  it  can  cross 
other  lines  and  cause  entanglements,  but  will 
ever  go  on  missing  the  ideal  of  completeness  in 
its  thinness  of  isolation. 

In  all  our  physical  appetites  we  recognize  a 
limit.  We  know  that  to  exceed  that  limit  is  to 
exceed  the  limit  of  health.  But  has  this  lust 
for  wealth  and  power  no  bounds  beyond  which 
is  death's  dominion  ?  In  these  national  carnivals 
of  materialism  are  not  the  Western  peoples 
spending  most  of  their  vital  energy  in  merely 
producing  things  and  neglecting  the  creation  of 
ideals  ?  And  can  a  civilization  ignore  the  law 
of  moral  health  and  go  on  in  its  endless  process 
of  inflation  by  gorging  upon  material  things  ? 
Man  in  his  social  ideals  naturally  tries  to  regulate 
his  appetites,  subordinating  them  to  the  higher 
purpose  of  his  nature.  But  in  the  economic 
world  our  appetites  follow  no  other  restrictions 


120  NATIONALISM 

but  those  of  supply  and  demand  which  can  be 
artificially  fostered,  affording  individuals  oppor- 
tunities for  indulgence  in  an  endless  feast  of 
grossness.  In  India  our  social  instincts  imposed 
restrictions  upon  our  appetites, — maybe  it  went 
to  the  extreme  of  repression, — but  in  the  West 
the  spirit  of  economic  organization  with  no 
moral  purpose  goads  the  people  into  the  per- 
petual pursuit  of  wealth ;  but  has  this  no 
wholesome  limit  ? 

The  ideals  that  strive  to  take  form  in  social 
institutions  have  two  objects.  One  is  to  regulate 
our  passions  and  appetites  for  the  harmonious 
development  of  man,  and  the  other  is  to  help 
him  to  cultivate  disinterested  love  for  his  fellow- 
creatures.  Therefore  society  is  the  expression 
of  those  moral  and  spiritual  aspirations  of  man 
which  belong  to  his  higher  nature. 

Our  food  is  creative,  it  builds  our  body ;  but 
not  so  wine,  which  stimulates.  Our  social  ideals 
create  the  human  world,  but  when  our  mind  is 
diverted  from  them  to  greed  of  power  then  in 
that  state  of  intoxication  we  live  in  a  world  of 
abnormality  where  our  strength  is  not  health 
and  our  liberty  is  not  freedom.  Therefore 
political  freedom  does  not  give  us  freedom  when 
our  mind  is  not  free.     An  automobile  does  not 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        121 

create  freedom  of  movement,  because  it  is  a  mere 
machine.  When  I  myself  am  free  I  can  use  the 
automobile  for  the  purpose  of  my  freedom. 

We  must  never  forget  in  the  present  day 
that  those  people  who  have  got  their  political 
freedom  are  not  necessarily  free,  they  are  merely 
powerful.  The  passions  which  are  unbridled  in 
them  are  creating  huge  organizations  of  slavery 
in  the  disguise  of  freedom.  Those  who  have 
made  the  gain  of  money  their  highest  end  are 
unconsciously  selling  their  life  and  soul  to  rich 
persons  or  to  the  combinations  that  represent 
money.  Those  who  are  enamoured  of  their 
political  power  and  gloat  over  their  extension 
of  dominion  over  foreign  races  gradually  sur- 
render their  own  freedom  and  humanity  to  the 
organizations  necessary  for  holding  other  peoples 
in  slavery.  In  the  so-called  free  countries  the 
majority  of  the  people'  are  not  free,  they  are 
driven  by  the  minority  to  a  goal  which  is  not 
even  known  to  them.  This  becomes  possible 
only  because  people  do  not  acknowledge  moral 
and  spiritual  freedom  as  their  object.  They 
create  huge  eddies  with  their  passions,  and  they 
feel  dizzily  inebriated  with  the  mere  velocity 
of  their  whirling  movement,  taking  that  to  be 
freedom.      But  the  doom  which  is  waiting  to 


122  NATIONALISM 

overtake  them  is  as  certain  as  death — for  man's 
truth  is  moral  truth  and  his  emancipation  is  in 
the  spiritual  life. 

The  general  opinion  of  the  majority  of  the 
present-day  nationalists  in  India  is  that  we  have 
come  to  a  final  completeness  in  our  social  and 
spiritual  ideals,  the  task  of  the  constructive  work 
of  society  having  been  done  several  thousand 
years  before  we  were  born,  and  that  now  we 
are  free  to  employ  all  our  activities  in  the 
political  direction.  We  never  dream  of  blaming 
our  social  inadequacy  as  the  origin  of  our  present 
helplessness,  for  we  have  accepted  as  the  creed 
of  our  nationalism  that  this  social  system  has 
been  perfected  for  all  time  to  come  by  our 
ancestors,  who  had  the  superhuman  vision  of  all 
eternity  and  supernatural  power  for  making 
infinite  provision  for  future  ages.  Therefore, 
for  all  our  miseries  and  shortcomings,  we  hold 
responsible  the  historical  surprises  that  burst 
upon  us  from  outside.  This  is  the  reason  why 
we  think  that  our  one  task  is  to  build  a  political 
miracle  of  freedom  upon  the  quicksand  of  social 
slavery.  In  fact  we  want  to  dam  up  the  true 
course  of  our  own  historical  stream,  and  only 
borrow  power  from  the  sources  of  other  peoples' 
history. 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        123 

Those  of  us  in  India  who  have  come  under 
the  delusion  that  mere  pohtical  freedom  will  \ 
make  us  free  have  accepted  their  lessons  from 
the  West  as  the  gospel  truth  and  lost  their 
faith  m  humanity.  We  must  remember  what- 
ever weakness  we  cherish  in  our  society  will 
become  the  source  of  danger  in  politics.  The 
same  inertia  which  leads  us  to  our  idolatry  of 
dead  forms  in  social  institutions  will  create  in 
our  politics  prison-houses  with  immovable  walls. 
The  narrowness  of  sympathy  which  makes  it 
possible  for  us  to  impose  upon  a  considerable 
portion  of  humanity  the  galling  yoke  of  in- 
feriority will  assert  itself  in  our  politics  in 
creating  the  tyranny  of  injustice. 

When  our  nationalists  talk  about  ideals  they 
forget  that  the  basis  of  nationalism  is  wanting. 
The  very  people  who  are  upholding  these  ideals 
are  themselves  the  most  conservative  in  their 
social  practice.  Nationalists  say,  for  example, 
look  at  Switzerland  where,  in  spite  of  race 
differences,  the  peoples  have  solidified  into  a 
nation.  Yet,  remember  that  in  Switzerland  the 
races  can  mingle,  they  can  intermarry,  because 
they  are  of  the  same  blood.  In  India  there  is 
no  common  birthright.  And  when  we  talk  of 
Western  Nationality  we  forget  that  the  nations 


124  NATIONALISM 

there  do  not  have  that  physical  repulsion,  one 
for  the  other,  that  we  have  between  different 
castes.  Have  we  an  instance  in  the  whole  world 
where  a  people  who  are  not  allowed  to  mingle 
their  blood  shed  their  blood  for  one  another 
except  by  coercion  or  for  mercenary  purposes  ? 
And  can  we  ever  hope  that  these  moral  barriers 
against  our  race  amalgamation  will  not  stand  in 
the  way  of  our  political  unity  ? 

Then  again  we  must  give  full  recognition  to 
this  fact  that  our  social  restrictions  are  still 
tyrannical,  so  much  so  as  to  make  men  cowards. 
If  a  man  tells  me  he  has  heterodox  ideas,  but 
that  he  cannot  follow  them  because  he  would 
be  socially  ostracized,  I  excuse  him  for  having 
to  live  a  life  of  untruth,  in  order  to  live  at  all. 
The  social  habit  of  mind  which  impels  us  to 
make  the  life  of  our  fellow-beings  a  burden  to 
them  where  they  differ  from  us  even  in  such  a 
thing  as  their  choice  of  food,  is  sure  to  persist  in 
our  political  organization  and  result  in  creating 
engines  of  coercion  to  crush  every  rational 
difference  which  is  the  sign  of  life.  And  tyranny 
will  only  add  to  the  inevitable  lies  and  hypocrisy 
in  our  political  life.  Is  the  mere  name  of  freedom 
so  valuable  that  we  should  be  willing  to  sacrifice 
for  its  sake  our  moral  freedom  ? 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        125 

The  intemperance  of  our  habits  does  not  im- 
mediately show  its  effects  when  we  are  in  the 
vigour  of  our  youth.  But  it  gradually  consumes 
that  vigour,  and  when  the  period  of  decline  sets 
in  then  we  have  to  settle  accounts  and  pay  off 
our  debts,  which  leads  us  to  insolvency.  In  the 
West  you  are  still  able  to  carry  your  head  high, 
though  your  humanity  is  suffering  every  moment 
from  its  dipsomania  of  organizing  power.  India 
also  in  the  heyday  of  her  youth  could  carry  in 
her  vital  organs  the  dead  weight  of  her  social 
organizations  stiffened  to  rigid  perfection,  but  it 
has  been  fatal  to  her,  and  has  produced  a  gradual 
paralysis  of  her  living  nature.  And  this  is  the 
reason  why  the  educated  community  of  India 
has  become  insensible  of  her  social  needs.  They 
are  taking  the  very  immobility  of  our  social 
structures  as  the  sign  of  their  perfection, — and 
because  the  healthy  feeling  of  pain  is  dead  in  the 
limbs  of  our  social  organism  they  delude  them- 
selves into  thinking  that  it  needs  no  ministra- 
tion. Therefore  they  think  that  all  their 
energies  need  their  only  scope  in  the  political 
field.  It  is  like  a  man  whose  legs  have  become 
shrivelled  and  useless,  trying  to  delude  himself 
that  these  limbs  have  grown  still  because  they 
have  attained  their  ultimate  salvation,  and  all 


126  NATIONALISM 

that  is  wrong  about  him  is  the  shortness  of  his 
sticks. 

So  much  for  the  social  and  the  political 
regeneration  of  India.  Now  we  come  to  her 
industries,  and  I  am  very  often  asked  whether 
there  is  in  India  any  industrial  regeneration  since 
the  advent  of  the  British  Government.  It  must 
be  remembered  that  at  the  beginning  of  the 
British  rule  in  India  our  industries  were  sup- 
pressed, and  since  then  we  have  not  met  with 
any  real  help  or  encouragement  to  enable  us  to 
make  a  stand  against  the  monster  commercial 
organizations  of  the  world.  The  nations  have 
decreed  that  we  must  remain  purely  an  agri- 
cultural people,  even  forgetting  the  use  of  arms  . 
for  all  time  to  come.  Thus  India  is  being  turned 
into  so  many  predigested  morsels  of  food  ready 
to  be  swallowed  at  any  moment  by  any  nation 
which  has  even  the  most  rudimentary  set  of 
teeth  in  its  head. 

India  therefore  has  very  little  outlet  for  her 
industrial  originality.  I  personally  do  not  believe 
in  the  unwieldy  organizations  of  the  present  day. 
The  very  fact  that  they  are  ugly  shows  that  they 
are  in  discordance  with  the  whole  creation.  The 
vast  powers  of  nature  do  not  reveal  their  truth 
in   hideousness,  but  in  beauty.     Beauty  is  the 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        127 

signature  which  the  Creator  stamps  upon  His 
works  when  He  is  satisfied  with  them.  All  our 
products  that  insolently  ignore  the  laws  of  per- 
fection and  are  unashamed  in  their  display  of 
ungainliness  bear  the  perpetual  weight  of  God's 
displeasure.  So  far  as  your  commerce  lacks  the 
dignity  of  grace  it  is  untrue.  Beauty  and  her 
twin  brother  Truth  require  leisure  and  self- 
control  for  their  growth.  But  the  greed  of  gain 
has  no  time  or  limit  to  its  capaciousness.  Its 
one  object  is  to  produce  and  consume.  It  has 
pity  neither  for  beautiful  nature  nor  for  living 
human  beings.  It  is  ruthlessly  ready  without  a 
moment's  hesitation  to  crush  beauty  and  life  out 
of  them,  moulding  them  into  money.  It  is  this 
ugly  vulgarity  of  commerce  which  brought  upon 
it  the  censure  of  contempt  in  our  earlier  days, 
when  men  had  leisure  to  have  an  unclouded 
vision  of  perfection  in  humanity.  Men  in  those 
times  were  rightly  ashamed  of  the  instinct  of 
mere  money-making.  But  in  this  scientific  age 
money,  by  its  very  abnormal  bulk,  has  won  its 
throne.  And  when  from  its  eminence  of  piled- 
up  things  it  insults  the  higher  instincts  of  man, 
banishing  beauty  and  noble  sentiments  from  its 
surroundings,  we  submit.  For  we  in  our  mean- 
ness have  accepted  bribes  from  its  hands  and  our 


128  NATIONALISM 

imagination  has  grovelled  in  the  dust  before  its 
immensity  of  flesh. 

But  its  very  unwieldiness  and  its  endless 
complexities  are  its  true  signs  of  failure.  The 
swimmer  who  is  an  expert  does  not  exhibit  his 
muscular  force  by  violent  movements,  but  ex- 
hibits some  power  which  is  invisible  and  which 
shows  itself  in  perfect  grace  and  reposefulness. 
The  true  distinction  of  man  from  animals  is  in 
his  power  and  worth  which  are  inner  and  invisible. 
But  the  present-day  commercial  civilization  of 
man  is  not  only  taking  too  much  time  and  space 
but  killing  time  and  space.  Its  movements  are 
violent,  its  noise  is  discordantly  loud.  It  is 
carrying  its  own  damnation  because  it  is  tramp- 
ling into  distortion  the  humanity  upon  which  it 
stands.  It  is  strenuously  turning  out  money  at 
the  cost  of  happiness.  Man  is  reducing  himself 
to  his  minimum  in  order  to  be  able  to  make 
amplest  room  for  his  organizations.  He  is 
deriding  his  human  sentiments  into  shame 
because  they  are  apt  to  stand  in  the  way  of 
his  machines. 

In  our  mythology  we  have  the  legend  that 
the  man  who  performs  penances  for  attaining 
immortality  has  to  meet  with  temptations  sent 
by  Indra,  the  Lord  of  the  immortals.     If  he  is 


NATIONALISM  IN  INDIA        129 

lured  by  them  he  is  lost.  The  West  has  been 
striving  for  centuries  after  its  goal  of  im- 
mortality. Indra  has  sent  her  the  temptation 
to  try  her.  It  is  the  gorgeous  temptation  of 
wealth.  She  has  accepted  it,  and  her  civilization 
of  humanity  has  lost  its  path  in  the  wilderness 
of  machinery. 

This  commercialism  with  its  barbarity  of  ugly 
decorations  is  a  terrible  menace  to  all  humanity, 
because  it  is  setting  up  the  ideal  of  power  over 
that  of  perfection.  It  is  making  the  cult  of  self- 
seeking  exult  in  its  naked  shamelessness.  Our 
nerves  are  more  delicate  than  our  muscles. 
Things  that  are  the  most  precious  in  us  are 
helpless  as  babes  when  we  take  away  from  them 
the  careful  protection  which  they  claim  from  us 
for  their  very  preciousness.  Therefore,  when  the 
callous  rudeness  of  power  runs  amuck  in  the 
broad-way  of  humanity  it  scares  away  by  its 
grossness  the  ideals  which  we  have  cherished 
with  the  martyrdom  of  centuries. 

The  temptation  which  is  fatal  for  the  strong 

is  still  more  so  for  the  weak.     And  I  do  not 

welcome  it  in  our  Indian  life,  even  though  it  be 

sent  by  the  lord  of  the  Immortals.     Let  our  life 

be  simple  in  its  outer  aspect  and  rich  in  its  inner 

gain.     Let  our  civilization  take  its  firm  stand 

K 


130  NATIONALISM 

upon  its  basis  of  social  co-operation  and  not 
upon  that  of  economic  exploitation  and  conflict. 
How  to  do  it  in  the  teeth  of  the  drainage  of  our 
life-blood  by  the  economic  dragons  is  the  task 
set  before  the  thinkers  of  all  oriental  nations 
who  have  faith  in  the  human  soul.  It  is  a  sign 
of  laziness  and  impotency  to  accept  conditions 
imposed  upon  us  by  others  who  have  other 
ideals  than  ours.  We  should  actively  try  to 
adapt  the  world  powers  to  guide  our  history  to 
its  own  perfect  end. 

From  the  above  you  will  know  that  I  am  not 
an  economist,  I  am  willing  to  acknowledge  that 
there  is  a  law  of  demand  and  supply  and  an 
infatuation  of  man  for  more  things  than  are  good 
for  him.  And  yet  I  will  persist  in  believing  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  the  harmony  of  com- 
pleteness in  humanity,  where  poverty  does  not 
take  away  his  riches,  where  defeat  may  lead  him 
to  victory,  death  to  immortality,  and  where  in 
the  compensation  of  Eternal  Justice  those  who 
are  the  last  may  yet  have  their  insult  transmuted 
into  a  golden  triumph. 


THE  SUNSET  OF  THE  CENTURY 


181 


/ 


THE  SUNSET  OF  THE  CENTURY 

{Written  in  the  Bengali  on  the  last  day  qf  last 

^     century) 


The  last  sun  of  the  century  sets  amidst  the 
blood  -  red  clouds  of  the  West  and  the 
whirlwind  of  hatred. 

The  naked  passion  of  self-love  of  Nations,  in  its 
drunken  delirium  of  greed,  is  dancing  to  the 
clash  of  steel  and  the  howling  verses  of 
vengeance. 


The  hungry  self  of  the  Nation  shall  burst  in  a 
violence  of  fury  from  its  own  shameless 
feeding. 

For  it  has  made  the  world  its  food, 

133 


134  NATIONALISM 

And  licking  it,  crunching  it  and  swallowing  it  in 

big  morsels, 

It  swells  and  swells 
Till  in  the  midst  of  its  unholy  feast  descends  the 

sudden  shaft  of  heaven  piercing  its  heart  of 

grossness. 


The  crimson  glow  of  light  on  the  horizon  is  not  the 
light  of  thy  dawn  of  peace,  my  Motherland. 

It  is  the  glimmer  of  the  funeral  pyre  burning  to 
ashes  the  vast  flesh, — the  self-love  of  the 
Nation — dead  under  its  own  excess. 

Thy  morning  waits  behind  the  patient  dark  of 
the  East, 

Meek  and  silent. 


4 

Keep  watch,  India. 

Bring  your  offerings  of  worship  for  that  sacred 

sunrise. 
Let  the  first  hymn  of  its  welcome  sound  in  your 

voice  and  sing 
"Come,  Peace,    thou   daughter   of  God's   own 

great  suffering. 


THE  SUNSET  OF  THE  CENTUKY     135 

Come  with   thy  treasure   of  contentment,  the 
sword  of  fortitude, 

And  meekness  crowning  thy  forehead." 


Be  not  ashamed,  my  brothers,  to  stand  before 
the  proud  and  the  powerful 

With  your  white  robe  of  simpleness. 

Let  your  crown  be  of  humility,  your  freedom 
the  freedom  of  the  soul. 

Build  God's  throne  daily  upon  the  ample  bare- 
ness of  your  poverty 

And  know  that  what  is  huge  is  not  great  and  pride 
is  not  everlasting. 


THE   END 


Printed  by  R.  &  R.  Clark,  Limited,  Edinburgh. 


Date  Due 

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Library  Bureau 

Cat.  No.  1137 

mmm 


CLAPP 


3  5002  00082  2424 


Tagore,  Rabmdranath 
Nationalism, 


JC  311  . T26  1918 

Tagore,  Rabindranath,  1861 
1941. 

Nationaliem 


*xi  "^